Findings: Streamlining M&A Risk and Issue Management with DealRoom

In the world of mergers and acquisitions (M&A), managing risks and issues is crucial to success. Traditionally, teams have relied on spreadsheets for this task - a familiar but often cumbersome and error-prone method. 

Enter Findings, a feature in the DealRoom M&A Platform. This feature aims to optimize how corp dev and integration teams handle risks and issues, making the process more structured, collaborative, and efficient.

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Curious if Findings can optimize your M&A process? Keep reading to discover how this powerful feature can increase your overall efficiencies while managing risks and issues in your deals.

‍Moving Beyond Spreadsheets: The Need for Change

Excel has historically served as the primary tool for managing risks and issues in the due diligence and integration planning phases of deal lifecycle management. However, its shortcomings have become more evident over time. The manual nature of data entry and updates in Excel can prove to be time-consuming and error-prone. Furthermore, the absence of real-time collaboration features makes it difficult to keep all stakeholders updated simultaneously. Tracking changes and updates within Excel can also pose challenges, leading to a lack of transparency. Moreover, Excel sheets often lack clear links to specific diligence requests, resulting in a disconnect between findings and their relevant tasks or categories. 

DealRoom’s Findings feature addresses these pain points by offering a centralized, real-time platform for risk and issue management. 

1. Immediate Risk Logging and Categorization

Users can effortlessly log a finding, fill in detailed parameters such as severity and likelihood, and assign it to relevant team members. This feature ensures that all potential issues are captured and categorized immediately, reducing the likelihood of oversights and enabling teams to prioritize effectively.

For instance, upon discovering a high-risk scenario like "Undisclosed Tax Liabilities and Pending Tax Disputes" on the diligence page, the tax compliance team can swiftly log it, ensuring prompt attention and appropriate categorization for quick resolution.

2. Collaborative Mitigation and Resolution Plans

Upon logging a risk, team members can promptly engage in discussions and formulate a mitigation plan. Assigning specific team members as assignees, reviewers, and followers ensures comprehensive engagement, allowing for thorough examination and timely resolution of the identified risk. 

For example, upon identifying the risk of "Inadequate Integration of Financial Systems and Processes" related to Finance and IT workstreams, the assigned leads can promptly collaborate on a mitigation plan. Assignees manage the process, while top management or integration heads can be marked as followers to stay informed, ensuring efficient integration and minimizing operational risks.

3. Real-Time Notifications for Immediate Action

DealRoom’s Findings feature sends instant alerts for new risks, status updates, or comments, ensuring proactive communication. This approach enables quicker responses to challenges and ensures nothing falls through the cracks. 

For instance, as a work-stream integration member, receiving timely alerts about emerging risks or changes allows for prompt adaptation and response, minimizing the impact on integration.

4. Customizable Parameters

Users can define the severity and likelihood of each risk, allowing for a more nuanced approach to resource allocation. This feature brings clarity to the decision-making process, helping teams focus on what truly matters for the success of the deal.

5. Comprehensive Logs for Full Transparency

All risks, issues, actions, and decisions are logged in a centralized findings report, accessible and updatable in real-time. This not only fosters collaboration but also serves as a historical record, aiding in future risk assessment and corporate learning.

6. Track Progress in Real-Time

Easily monitor the status of each finding with customizable statuses like open, in progress, and completed. By tracking the progress in real-time, the team can ensure that issues are addressed promptly, preventing potential delays in the integration process. 

7. Effortlessly transfer of data to Excel

Users can also export all findings to Excel for offline analysis, providing a comprehensive overview of all risks, issues, actions, and decisions.

8. Streamlined Reporting for Decision Making

Generate and schedule delivery of findings reports to key stakeholders, reducing administrative burden and enabling timely, informed decisions. As an illustration, imagine the integration lead scheduling a weekly report on risk findings to be automatically sent to the executive team. This ensures that decision-makers have access to up-to-date information to guide their strategic decisions throughout the merger process.