We made significant progress during the first seven months of our integration, our sights firmly set on becoming a new company that is globally recognized as a category of one.
Integration priorities and governance
Before embarking on the integration journey, we defined four priorities: ensuring business continuity, defining a new operating model, creating value through synergies and uniting the teams through common values and behaviors. We established an Integration Management Office (IMO) to design the new company across all Business Units and Business Partners, to deliver the integration objectives, and to ensure a comprehensive view on the integration process.
Business continuity
Business continuity was a key priority for the integration, and the transition proceeded smoothly. This was helped by the solid preparatory work done by the integration teams who completed over 1,000 tasks, tested approximately 230 scenario plans, and designed and trialed more than 30 interim processes. In addition, more than 15 Business Continuity Leads ensured stability during the hypercare phase. This preparation was instrumental in enabling a successful and memorable Day 1.
A memorable Day 1
The moment of combining two industry leaders whose respective heritages reach back more than 100 years involved a memorable Day 1 for our employees, customers, suppliers, and investors. From site transformations through an all-day global broadcast to our new brand reveal, Day 1, which fell on 9 May 2023, was packed with exciting surprises. We came together across the globe to celebrate a new company, with a new purpose: to bring progress to life. Day 1 filled us with the energy to deliver on our integrationplans in the months to come.
Value creation through synergies
Even before Day 1, we had made a significant investment in our clean teams in order to have cross-selling in place for the launch of the new company. Our detailed preparations paid off: Between the merger and the end of the year, we achieved significant cross-selling wins across our Business Units in the first seven months from the merger. With that, we are well positioned to deliver incremental revenue synergies of around €500 million, with a full run rate achieved by the end of year four.
In June, we hosted our first-ever supplier summit, bringing together more than 100 representatives of our top suppliers to exchange ideas. Alongside this, we introduced a dedicated program, ‘Catalyst for Growth’, to better structure spending across the company and help us accelerate cost savings from procurement synergies. This, with our planned actions to reduce General & Administrative (G&A) expenses, generated significant cost savings by year end.
For more information on integration synergies, please see Financial Performance.
New operating model
The new dsm-firmenich operating model and organization was defined well before closing. It lays out how dsm-firmenich will operate as one group that drives the priorities, strategy and standards, while at the same time giving the Business Units a high degree of autonomy to ensure our market approach is agile and close to customers.
The implementation of the operating model progressed at speed: Before the end of 2023, we had appointed more than 730 leaders and had implemented the target organization design at all levels of the company, putting us in a position to operate as a single integrated team with common processes and ways of working. Integration of the underlying systems commenced in 2023 and will continue during 2024.
Purpose, values, and behaviors
Shared purpose, values, and behaviors are the foundations of our new company culture and identity. We launched our new values on Day 1, building on the heritage of two great legacy cultures to guide us on our integration journey.
More than 550 Culture Catalysts, a network of colleagues who volunteered as change agents within our company, helps us live our new culture and values. Our Culture Catalysts engaged more than 5,500 of our employees in a 72-hour ‘Behavior Jam’ to define our new company behaviors, allowing us to map out how to bring our purpose to life in our daily work. We also launched a Pulse Survey shortly after Day 1 to capture employee feedback and more than 17,000 colleagues shared their views and helped to shape the culture agenda.
Setup for success
The year 2023 was pivotal: We became a new company and made significant progress on the integration of our two legacy organizations, bringing together the best of both worlds in pursuit of our vision to become a category of one. With our focus on integration, we have laid firm foundations for us to succeed in our purpose to bring progress to life.
