When Snap-on Inc. acquired ProQuest Business Solutions in late 2006 and formed Snap-on Business Solutions Inc., there were a few challenges. Departments were performing the same tasks and the new people needed to learn the acquiring organization’s culture and processes.
“The core problem was you take these two stand-alone businesses and you put them together, and now you have obviously some areas of overlap, which typically you would not accept,” says Tim Chambers, who was named president of the newly formed entity in early 2009.
“A lot of that was in our sales channel. You could have two people calling on the same customer and they are now from the same company. We went about a process of declaring that we were moving to one sales organization and that one sales organization was going to represent the entire product portfolio.”
Snap-on had a “who we are” statement, that defined the mission, vision and core beliefs of the company as a whole, but as Snap-on Business Solutions, there wasn’t that one unifying document that defined the operations of the company for its 850 employees.
“When I got here, a lot of the integration had just started, so the combined entity actually needed to get clarity on what their mission was,” he says. “The person who was appointed to drive these pieces of business together was new to the Snap-on side and had been at the acquisition for a year, so relatively new, and there wasn’t a unifying mission that had been created for the combined entity.
“The first few months we worked really hard on getting a mission — what are the key deliverables? Why does it make sense that these two businesses are together, what is the value proposition? So that was the piece we worked on really hard initially. I would say that was the first two to three months.”