The deal is signed and the financial model checked out. But no one has written down what needs to be different on Monday than it was on Friday. The three-million synergy sits on a spreadsheet, not next to a name with a date attached. Two org charts are laid over each other, and in the places where they don't line up, things have gone quiet. The people who know exactly where the value sits are the ones who answer a recruiter's call first — precisely in the months when there's still no answer to who takes over which customer, which system, or which team.
That is the problem this front door was built for: not the deal itself, but the translation of the deal into who does what, when, and with what assumption if that translation goes wrong.
The front door delivers three documents, not advice.
The synergy baseline is a dataset in which every synergy gets a source, an owner, a timeline, and a testable assumption. No amount without a name, no name without a date. What isn't assigned to an owner stays visible as an open item — not rounded away until the total adds up.
The Day 1 plan is a checklist dataset covering legal structure, contracts, payments, access, and communication: the things that literally cannot wait, sorted by what happens if they do wait anyway.
The Day 100 plan sorts the remaining decisions by the cost of uncertainty — what delay costs, what a wrong choice costs that you can already see coming. This produces a sequence based not on what's easiest to do first, but on what's most costly to leave sitting.
Around this, the integration office dashboard functions as a working tool, not as after-the-fact reporting: benefit tracking per synergy with status lights and clocks, an agenda for the decision forum, visible dependencies between workstreams, and a key-person risk list based on role — who is indispensable for the continuity of a process, not who performs well or poorly. Across a series of acquisitions, the hundred-day setup can be saved as a reusable configuration, so that not every deal has to be built from scratch again. And for every workstream, one fixed question is asked: should this actually be merged at all, or does integrating here destroy value that's worth more kept separate?
Exactly how these components are built is set out on how it works; what the documents look like in practice is on outcomes.
Deal intake. Thesis, value sources, and entities are recorded — the starting point everything else refers back to.
Synergy baseline wizard. Every synergy gets a source, owner, timeline, and testable assumption, instead of an amount with no origin.
Day 1 and Day 100 generators. The checklists and the decision-by-cost-of-uncertainty plan are built from the intake and the baseline, not separately from them.
Integration office dashboard. Clocks and benefit tracking continue through the monthly recalibration, so the synergy baseline remains a living document rather than a starting point forgotten after Day 1.
Every figure in the baseline can be traced back to the source entered at intake: a contract, a cost item, an org chart, a customer concentration. The tool adds nothing that wasn't supplied and doesn't calculate on assumptions that aren't flagged as assumptions. What's unclear stays unclear in the report — as an open question, not as an estimated certainty. That is also why a synergy without an owner remains visible as a synergy without an owner, and isn't quietly added to the total.
There is no completed PMI track record being referred to here. The tool structures an integration; it does not prove a track record — that claim cannot be made here, and so it isn't made.
The baseline makes assumptions testable; it does not guarantee synergy realization. What actually gets realized depends on execution, market conditions, and decisions made after the report.
The key-person risk list is role-based and contains no assessments of individuals. It speaks to dependency on a function, not to who does good work.
Those who do it themselves work with the three documents and the dashboard, including templates for decision forums and communication. Those who want part of it guided keep the tool as the record of record while a partner advises on organizational design, culture, and leadership — the parts no dataset alone can resolve. Those who want to outsource it entirely have a full integration office staffed by that partner, working on the same engine built here. More background on these choices is available in the knowledge base.
A synergy baseline with an owner attached is not yet a staffing schedule. Those who want to know what Day 1 and Day 100 mean concretely in tasks, hours, and systems will find that translation work in the work scan from [FTE to AI](https://ftetoai.com).
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.