Kennisbank

Traffic lights for synergies in a buy-and-build

In a buy-and-build, something accumulates that is still manageable in a single deal: each acquisition brings its own list of synergies, and after a few platform deals you're no longer counting one synergy baseline but a system of dozens of line items, each with its own assumption, its own owner, and its own pace. A traffic light is then no decoration on a dashboard. It is the only way to see at a glance which items are still on track, which are delayed, and which have quietly been let go without anyone having made that decision explicitly.

What a traffic light actually measures

A colour means nothing by itself. Green, amber or red only has meaning if it has been established beforehand what it is measured against: which amount, which deadline, which milestone. Without that reference point, a traffic light becomes a mood rather than a measurement — the owner feels good about progress, so it's green. That is exactly the problem that arises if you don't first establish which assumption underlies your synergy amount: the colour then follows the owner's feeling, not the reality of the assumption. In a buy-and-build with multiple platforms, that risk is greater, because each platform brings its own culture of optimism or caution to how it colours its own traffic lights.

A workable traffic light therefore has three fixed components: the amount or milestone against which it is tested, the date on which that last happened, and the reason for the current colour in a few words. Without those three, a traffic light is a colour without content, and a row of colours without content is not an overview — it's a list of reassuring dots.

Who sets the colour

In a single deal, it's still manageable to know who tracks a synergy. In a buy-and-build with multiple platforms and a growing list of acquisitions, that question becomes structural, and the answer quickly shifts to "the integration manager keeps track of the overview". That is not ownership, that is administration. The question who owns a synergy should produce, per line item, a name of someone who can influence the amount — an operations manager, a sales director, a procurement lead — not someone who can only report the amount.

In a buy-and-build there is an extra layer: who sets the colour for synergies that run across platforms, such as shared procurement or a joint back-office system? If three platform directors all have a piece of ownership and no one has the whole, a traffic light emerges that shows green three times over while the synergy as a whole lands nowhere. That overlap must be explicitly assigned before the first reporting round begins, not afterwards when the colours contradict each other.

What the colour does to the deal thesis

A traffic light that stays amber for a long time is not a reporting problem, it's a signal about the deal thesis itself. Each acquisition in a buy-and-build carries a piece of the reason why the portfolio as a whole should be worth more than the sum of its parts, and that reason — the deal thesis and why it disappears — often becomes vague as soon as the synergies themselves remain stuck on the shelf. A traffic light that structurally stays amber or red is then not just an execution problem for one line item, but an indication that the assumption underlying the thesis needs to be reviewed.

To be able to see that before it's too late, you need to regularly test whether a synergy is still achievable, not just whether it's proceeding according to plan. A synergy can be exactly on schedule and still no longer be achievable, because the market, the organisation or the people have changed since the deal. A traffic light system that only measures progress and not achievability misses that shift until the deadline has already passed.

Red is not failure

A red synergy does not have to be treated as a failure, and a system that punishes red teaches owners to report amber when it's already red. More important than the colour is the decision that follows: continue, revise, or let go. In practice, that third option is taken the least, while what you do with a synergy that doesn't land can be just as valid an answer as course correction — especially in a buy-and-build, where merging two organisations can in itself already destroy value if the assumption underlying the synergy no longer holds. A traffic light system that only reports and does not invite that decision keeps red line items red for years without anyone closing them out.

The substantiation behind each colour — the amount, the source, the assumption — is exactly what makes or breaks a traffic light system, and how you substantiate a synergy determines whether that colour has ever been more than an estimate with a reassuring name.

To see what tracking all those traffic lights, assumptions and owners requires in terms of work from your integration office, you can use the work scan from FTE TO AI: it calculates, per task — updating files, collecting colours, flagging deviations — which part of it can be done with AI and which part must remain with a human because it requires judgement about an assumption or a decision.