The M&A Formula

5Accelerating Your M&A FormulaDigitizing M&A

Anything can be digitized, even M&A.

Corporate M&A is one of the last remaining sectors which is stuck in analog mode, but this is changing.

As you will know by now, the authors behind this book have an optimization curse in life that forces them to keep looking for ways to improve any corporate process. The first step was to compare the in-sourcing of financial services with the procurement of A4 paper. Now we would like to challenge your existing M&A processes by showing you that it is possible to digitize any industry in order to improve efficiency.

The worlds of transportation, banking, public services, healthcare, and retail are a few obvious examples of digitization success. So we challenged our team to come up with a business that could never be digitized. The winning suggestion was ‘waste management.’

Surely there was no way to digitize an industry that relied purely on manual labor and a physical product (trash). We all see the garbage trucks driving around our neighborhood; men jump out, grab the trash cans, and tip them into the back of the truck. Not a computer in sight.

We were wrong. In fact, one waste management company has been digitized for a very long time, and it has managed to make resource savings of up to 33% as a result.

San Diego waste management firm Daily Disposal was one of the first of its kind to see the efficiencies of digitization. By equipping each truck with a tablet, they were able to track each ...