Fortune 100 Global Biopharma Company

In 2020, Gagen MacDonald was engaged to support one of the largest biopharma acquisitions in history, made with the goal of helping the purchasing company get medicines to patients more quickly.

The combined company sought to seamlessly integrate people, processes and systems — creating one face and brand for customers and ensuring business continuity across 17 countries. This was complicated by the uncertainty of a pandemic.

Our Solution

M&A Integration Change & Transformation Employee Engagement

Challenge

Gagen partnered with the company’s Chief Financial Officer to build a global, integrated change management and communications (CM&C) program that ensured business continuity, helped forge a new culture and reduced disruption as the companies worked to integrate over a multi-year period.

Approach

Engaged company leaders, employees, suppliers, customers and government regulators to develop tools and resources they could use to navigate the changes brought by the integration
Partnered with leaders from across approximately 10 functions to document and understand specific market impacts and create change plans that considered cross-functional interdependencies
Developed CM&C guidelines and materials that could be adopted and customized locally to ensure a consistent stakeholder experience that considered cultural differences such as: beliefs, behaviors, practices and expressions, including language, time zone, workplace council regulations and COVID-19 protocols

Results

Minimized business disruption and enabled on-time delivery of life-saving medicines by:

Introducing 5,200+ colleagues to new systems, processes and ways of working in multiple waves over a two-year period
Supporting stakeholder identification, training and hypercare support, ensuring the successful integration from the legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the preferred one to ensure the seamless transition of critical financial data including 17,000+ suppliers and 13,000+ purchase orders
Supporting customer-facing change management efforts, ensuring the successful transition to a more efficient product distribution model and resulting in the effective transfer of 1.4+ million units of medicines to patients around the world
Training and onboarding local CM&C leads representing 17 markets to ensure a consistent stakeholder experience across the globe while accounting for cultural, regulatory and local nuances
Engaging 1,500+ stakeholders through a global recognition program that alleviated change fatigue effected by the multi-year integration and the pressures of a pandemic