Case Study
Divesting with focus
Leading complex divestiture while ensuring business continuity
Challenge
This multinational pharmaceutical, consumer health and crop sciences company is defined by a history of more than 150 years of continuous innovation.
To strengthen its focus on its business, this company chose to sell one of its businesses. Ensuring business continuity for both customers and employees during and after the transaction was critical. From day one, the divested entity needed fully functional, standalone operations for each country.
What Accenture did
As part of an overall strategy to strengthen its focus on its core life sciences business, the company reached a definitive agreement to sell one of its businesses, with operations in 24 countries.
An overriding goal of the divestiture, which would generate more than €1 billion, was to ensure business continuity for both customers and employees during and after the transaction. From day one, the divested entity needed fully functional, standalone operations based on transitional service agreements (TSAs)—including a fully-operational, integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to support the business models localized for each country. The company would continue to distribute the divested business’s products under a distributor services agreement for an agreed period of time.
To achieve these goals, the company chose to team with Accenture Strategy for its global reach, deep industry knowledge and experience in large, complex divestitures.
The company chose to team with Accenture Strategy for its global reach, deep industry knowledge, and expertise in large, complex divestitures.
People and culture
Accenture Strategy assembled an experienced team—co-located with the client in the United States, European Union, and Asia Pacific—to provide support across four primary areas:
- Planning advisory: Helping the leadership team review and guide the overall separation planning approach, including the project structure, governance and reporting, roles and responsibilities, and alignment of the separation plans.
- TSA functional: Managing the development, review and completion of the TSAs. Creating a structure for each country; and managing, tracking and validating the key deliverables. Accenture Strategy also helped define the post-closing governance, roles and responsibilities.
- Local country and functional separation planning: Designing and supporting each country’s roadmap and implementation plan. Helping coordinate separation activities and deliverables—considering the regulatory requirements unique to each country and leveraging local Accenture subject matter expertise.
- IT separation: Planning the disentanglement approach and driving the IT separation work across all impacted business functions. In addition to ensuring strategic alignment with the overall program leadership and governance, Accenture Strategy helped develop a comprehensive IT infrastructure and application separation strategy and conducted workshops to successfully migrate data.
Value delivered
Accenture Strategy and the company addressed and overcame multiple challenges to achieve a legal close on day one of the new business entity’s operations. The company now can focus exclusively on its core business and provide more innovative products to improve the lives of people around the world. The cash from the divestiture can enable the company to expand its research and development activities, supplement its in-house development portfolio, and strengthen its brands.
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