A synergy figure is usually fixed before the assumption behind it is. In the process a number is needed to make the model add up, and that number gets a place in the synergy baseline without anyone having said out loud what it depends on. That does not backfire at signing, but in the months after, when it turns out that the figure rested on an assumption nobody had tested.
Every synergy figure can be unpacked into three questions. What has to be true for this figure to hold? Who is responsible if it does not hold? And how will you see, before the year is out, whether it is heading in the right direction? Without an answer to those three questions, a synergy figure is a wish with a number attached, and wishes do not land by themselves.
The assumption is often the hardest part to get out into the open, precisely because it is implicit. "Purchasing advantage through scale" sounds like a synergy, but the assumption behind it is something like: both purchasing departments are willing to consolidate suppliers, the contracts expire at comparable moments, and the supplier is willing to reprice at higher volume. Any one of those three may turn out to be false, and then the figure disappears without anyone having seen it coming.
Synergy figures attached to a department instead of a person disappear most easily. "Finance" or "purchasing" is not an owner; a name is an owner. That person does not have to do the work themselves, but they are the one who can explain why a synergy is slipping, accelerating, or no longer achievable. Without that designation, responsibility evaporates in the day-to-day pressure of the first months, and no one feels called upon to defend the figure or drop it in time.
The generator for the synergy baseline enforces that link: no synergy without an assumption, no assumption without an owner. That does not prevent synergies from failing, but it does prevent them from failing unnoticed.
A synergy that is once in the baseline also needs to be tracked, and that tracking only works if it is simple. Anyone who expects an extensive explanation for every synergy will, after a few months, find no one left to fill in the report. Hence the traffic light model for tracking synergies works with a limited number of statuses instead of a narrative: on track, under pressure, or not achievable. That forces the owner into a choice rather than a nuance, and it is precisely that choice that makes a report usable for someone who has to oversee twenty synergies at once.
The question of whether a synergy is still achievable should not be asked only once the figures already disappoint. A fixed test of whether a synergy is still achievable works better as a standing agenda item than as a crisis meeting after the fact. The moment the underlying assumption no longer holds — the supplier will not reprice, the system cannot be migrated within the expected time — it is better to know that early than late.
Not every synergy that fails to land is a failure of execution. Sometimes the assumption was too optimistic from the start, and that is then not a reproach to the owner but information for the next step. The question is not how you force a synergy to land after all, but what then happens to the figure, the plan, and the expectations attached to it. What to do if a synergy does not land is therefore not an exception scenario, but a standing part of tracking synergies: adjust, redistribute, or drop, with a reason that is recorded rather than circulating in the hallways.
In a buy-and-build strategy, synergy figures stack up across successive deals, and that makes the substantiation harder, not easier. A synergy that made sense at the second acquisition does not automatically hold at the fifth, especially not if the platform organisation has itself changed in the meantime. How you substantiate a synergy within a buy-and-build is therefore not about a template you repeat, but about an assumption you test again and again against the organisation as it is now, not as it was at the previous deal.
The assumption underneath a synergy figure almost always touches the work itself somewhere: who does something, how much time it takes, and whether that is still the same after the merger. Once that question becomes concrete, it is useful to know how much of that work can actually be taken over by automation, because that changes the assumption itself. The work scan from FTE TO AI calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI, and that turns a synergy figure into something that does not rest on an estimate, but on a count.
Vraag maar wat er op Day 1 moet staan, of wat integreren juist kapotmaakt.
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