How do companies successfully consolidate solution oriented BUs to a new unified organization?

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First off, internal consolidation of BUs can be just as challenging and potentially disruptive to the businesses as a traditional merger with an external company. Therein lies the overarching premise for success: enable your A-team and prioritize attention from senior leaders. Secondly, envision the ‘merger’ going through a cycle of pre-close planning, Day-1 readiness and post-close implementation. Each step challenges the organization differently.Start off a successful integration by setting clear guiding principles through articulating the core strategic rationale of the ‘merger’ and from the start define the operating model. What are the key principles of the integration strategy and execution?Enforce integration leadership by managing the process from a central Integration Management Office (IMO) that orchestrates execution. The IMO needs to challenge functional workstream leads, manage risks and interdependencies and diligently track progress. This sets up the organization to accelerate value delivery – and provides a unique platform to reset the organization structure, sizing, focus and capabilities. Maximize cost synergies to fuel growth, while being hyper-alert on preventing any existing revenue erosion. Watch out for cultural differences (even though its an internal merger) and build the new organization with best talent from both BUs. This requires thoughtful talent management plans to accelerate employee engagement and adoption of new ways of working.If the ‘merger thesis’ relies on a unified go-to-market offering between a solutions focused new organization and product focused legacy BUs – it is important to provide both units the freedom to build partnerships and go to market relationships independently. As such ‘front-end’ business should continue to be customer solution oriented, while the “back end” product units need to be able to develop own sales channels – finding the right mix of solution vs industry is key. There will be incremental sales and marketing costs due to ‘coordination layers’ and they have to be tracked closely to ensure they are offset by incremental sales.