Mergers are complicated. When Henkel, a German home and personal care conglomerate, bought National Starch in 2008, finance executives faced the simultaneous challenges of integrating two separate treasuries while maintaining speedy collections for their combined customers.
When we acquired National Starch businesses, it doubled the size of Henkel's adhesives business in the region, said Ben Ho, vice-president of finance and controlling for Asia Pacific at Henkel. Henkel and National Starch had different ERP enterprise resource planning platforms and different banking relationships so our cash management was pretty scattered around and not coordinated. That's why after the acquisition we saw the need to become more standardised, optimised and efficient.
Dusseldorf-based Henkel's 2.7 billion $4.3...
