South Western Group, a professional services group growing by acquisition, needed each deal to end with one platform rather than another set of systems, with staff across Canada reaching several custom line-of-business applications securely.
We merged an acquired business into the group and supported the consolidations that followed, delivered Canada-wide application access over Citrix, standardized endpoints with Microsoft Intune, migrated to Microsoft 365, unified signatures and telephony, and built custom applications, automation, RPA and a data warehouse.
South Western Group grows by buying businesses. Each acquisition arrives with its own everything: its own identity system, devices configured by somebody with their own opinions, its own phone system, file storage, applications and idea of what normal looks like. On paper the deal closes and the business is part of the group. In practice it is part of the group when its people can do their jobs on the group's platform, and not before.
Two requirements made this harder than a one-off migration. Staff are spread across Canada and depend on several custom line-of-business applications, which have to be reachable securely from anywhere without being reinstalled and reconfigured on every device in every acquired entity. And this was never going to happen once: a group that acquires repeatedly cannot afford integration to be a bespoke project each time, because the cost of the fifth deal is set by decisions made during the first. That second point governed the whole engagement. The goal was not to absorb a business. It was to arrive at a platform where absorbing the next one is a known quantity.
Access first, because it unblocks people. Then standards, because they make the next deal cheaper. Then the reporting layer that only becomes possible once the first two exist.
The first integration establishes the pattern: what gets migrated, what gets retired, what order the cutover runs in, and which decisions are permanent. Later consolidations reused that pattern rather than rediscovering it, which is the difference between a repeatable process and a series of similar-looking projects.
The group's line-of-business applications are published through Citrix rather than installed on endpoints. That decouples “is this person able to work” from “has this person's laptop been rebuilt to our standard yet”, which matters enormously on day one of an acquisition. It also means the applications are maintained in one place for the whole country instead of on every device that runs them.
Intune gives every device the same enrolment path, configuration baseline and policy set regardless of which entity bought it or how it was managed before. Inherited devices stop being a collection of individual histories and become a fleet.
Mail and identity consolidated onto Microsoft 365. Email signatures were standardized centrally, which sounds trivial and is the most visible sign to clients that an acquisition has finished. A unified phone system replaced the separate arrangements each entity brought with it.
Where the group's processes did not fit available software, we built. Where processes were repetitive, rules-based and running across systems never designed to talk to each other, we automated them, including with robotic process automation where integration was not otherwise available.
A group assembled from acquisitions cannot report on itself until its records sit somewhere they can be compared. The warehouse turns several entities' data into one view of the organization, and it only became worth building once identity, applications and standards were consistent enough for the comparison to mean anything.
If you are buying businesses, decide early whether your model is a holding company or a single organization, because the technology follows from that and reversing the decision later is expensive. A holding company can leave acquired systems alone. A single organization cannot, and every month an acquired entity keeps its own stack, the harder it becomes to move, because people build habits and workarounds on whatever they are given.
Sequence access before standards. On the day a deal closes, acquired staff care about one thing: can they do their work. Published applications solve that immediately, without waiting for devices to be rebuilt or accounts fully migrated. Once people can work, standardization proceeds at a sensible pace instead of under pressure. And treat the unglamorous items as integration milestones rather than tidying up — a consistent signature, one phone system and a single directory are how an acquisition stops looking like an acquisition from the outside, and they are the prerequisites for consolidated reporting, because you cannot compare entities that do not yet describe themselves the same way.
Background: hosted Citrix and remote desktop; legal and professional services.
If you have a deal closing and no integration plan, or a previous acquisition that never fully landed, we have done this more than once. Our head office is 141 Main Street North, Markham.
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