7 Ways to Use Pinnacle Series During Mergers and Acquisitions

Make growing your business a breeze with our helpful tools.

Mergers and acquisitions are a common occurrence in the architecture, engineering, construction, and manufacturing world — and while they can be great for growing a business, they can also be tricky to manage. After all, you’re taking an entire company and trying to seamlessly blend it into your own. When each firm has its own people and methods of doing things, friction can emerge. 

That’s why you need tools that provide the structure and reliability required to make the transition as smooth as possible — which is where Pinnacle Series comes in! Our training and knowledge management software solution is designed to provide the support you need during even the most complex mergers and acquisitions. 

Take it from CHA Consulting, which acquired six firms in the span of just two years. They gave themselves an ambitious deadline of just 90 days per firm, and used Pinnacle Series to provide training, documentation, and standards to their brand-new end users.  

“Onboarding a new organization within 90 days is a very aggressive schedule, but it allows CHA to save a tremendous amount of operating costs,” explained Jessica Chambers, former Associate Vice President of Technology Integration for CHA. “If we didn’t leverage Pinnacle Series through integrations, especially during the pandemic, this target would be nearly impossible.”

So let’s get an idea of how this can work! Here are seven ways Pinnacle Series can maximize the success of mergers and acquisitions for AEC & M organizations:

1. Assess new employees’ skills
2. Store company standards and best practices
3. Prepare onboarding learning paths
4. Translate content for global mergers
5. Loop new employees into projects
6. Assign and track training
7. Integrate with other systems

Learn more about how you can use Pinnacle Series to accomplish your objectives during mergers and acquisitions below.

Assess new employees’ skills

With our integrated assessment tool, KnowledgeSmart, you can assess each new employee’s skills and identify their areas of strength vs. areas where they need further development. This helps you make sure the new employees you gain through mergers and acquisitions are receiving the training they need in order to be successful.

Martee Grainger, Talent Development Specialist at Atwell, said in a testimonial: “I think what leaders gain from it across our company is they’re getting better candidates with the assessment function — but also they know where their teams are, and that’s huge; that’s half the battle. So they get a new hire, they take the assessment, they know where they’re at, and they know where to work from.”

Store company standards and best practices

A central repository of company standards and best practices is essential to successful mergers or acquisitions. With Pinnacle Series, you can easily store all of your organization’s standards and best practices by leveraging our custom content abilities. This way, all of your new employees can easily access them, regardless of their location. This makes it easy for everyone in the new group to get up to speed quickly with how things work at your company.

Prepare onboarding learning paths

Onboarding new employees involves more than just throwing a few documents at them, of course. If your organization handles mergers and acquisitions frequently, it can be helpful to create a whole new set of resources you can use and reuse for the new employees. Using Pinnacle Series, you can create custom learning paths for new employees that are tailored to their particular department or team. This ensures that everyone is on the same page about the new company and their role in it, so they can start contributing quickly.

Translate content for global mergers

When you’re merging with a business located in a different country, you may need to translate your content into their native language. With Pinnacle Series, you don’t even have to think about this: it’s built in! All of our pre-loaded content can be automatically translated into over 90 languages; it just takes the click of a button for users to set their preferred language! Our translation tool can even be used to translate the custom content your firm adds to the platform. We’re dedicated to making sure everyone can access the learning materials they need. 

Loop new employees into projects

Existing projects don’t come to a halt during mergers and acquisitions! You just have to figure out how to add the right people to the right projects. In Pinnacle Series, our Work Groups feature makes this easy. When you use Work Groups for project management, all you have to do is add the new users to the corresponding project group. They’ll immediately be able to access the project-specific information and documentation they need, and begin collaborating with the other members.

Assign and track training

For companies in the AEC & M space, Pinnacle Series is the ideal comprehensive training solution, with a wealth of learning resources covering dozens of popular industry software programs. (Just have a look at our content catalog here!)

Atwell is a full-service consulting, engineering, and construction services firm that has plenty of acquisitions under its belt. And when all those new users need training, Grainger knows where to send them: “With Pinnacle, I have a one-stop shop that I send people to for training. And I just love that I don’t have to think about it — I know this is good content, I know this is on brand for what we’re doing.”

Our reporting tools also allow you to track the progress of each employee’s training. This helps you identify any points of friction or user adoption struggles, so you can potentially make changes for future mergers and acquisitions.

Integrate with other systems 

Because Pinnacle Series comes with an open API, you can easily integrate it with other corporate systems. This can be useful during a merger where you plan to keep some systems from each firm. Plus, you can quickly enable single sign-on (SSO) so the new users won’t have a ton of passwords to remember.

With Pinnacle Series, mergers and acquisitions no longer have to be a stressful experience. When you have the right tools in place, you can make sure that each merger or acquisition goes smoothly for all parties involved. 

If you’re a current Pinnacle Series subscriber whose organization will be taking part in a merger or acquisition, log in now to explore how our platform can help streamline the process, or reach out to your Customer Success Manager for additional support.

If you’re not a Pinnacle Series subscriber yet, contact our team to discuss your organization’s needs and get a demo or free trial of our solution today!