Tyco, ADT

Tyco International acquired hundreds of companies over a period of five decades. To move to the next level of business growth they found that they had to break up the organization into three large entities, one of which was ADT, the residential home security business.

The core of the business operations was made up of call centers, distribution centers where technicians were based, back-office operations, and enterprise-wide IT systems and applications. To provide business continuity during the separation, a series of Transition Service Agreements (TSAs) were created and executed.

Divestiture

The divestiture was a collection of programs, with resources and timelines defined and constrained by a collection of TSAs. In addition, the divestiture had a firm budget that program managers were to adhere to.

Significant issues that were overcome included

• Harmonization of technologies as they were spun out of Tyco
• Creation of a separate Oracle ERP environment
• Different business cultures between departments within ADT
• Large gaps in inventory and warehouse management systems
• Set up of a new distribution center in Atlanta
• Set up and capitalization of new data warehouse
• Overdependency upon a single person who created and managed the distribution software
• Cross-training of staff in new processes and applications