From manual preparation to structured board-ready analyses

The company is a globally active testing, inspection and certification group generating annual revenues in the multi-billion-euro range. Its Corporate M&A team evaluates acquisition opportunities across multiple service lines and geographies, operating in a market where the number of significant competitors is limited and transaction multiples are well-established.

M&A activity is selective and opportunistic rather than systematic. The team does not run continuous target screening programmes; instead, it evaluates a relatively high volume of inbound opportunities and, for each one, must produce a structured internal analysis, the Gate 1 document, for board approval. This document covers strategic rationale, financial assessment, valuation and integration considerations.

Preparing these analyses was time-consuming. Information had to be gathered from several separate databases and tools, financial data was inconsistent in quality and coverage, and the final output had to be manually assembled into board-presentable format. The team had tested a range of tools over time, none of which fully addressed both the data quality and the output format requirements simultaneously.

The main challenges were:

The team tested StrategyBridgeAI against a concrete use case: a benchmarking analysis for a target in the testing and inspection sector, using known global peers including listed and non-listed competitors. The Hawkeye report was the central focus of evaluation.

What stood out was the combination of financial depth and structured output. The report covered competitor benchmarking, industry analysis and a valuation range based on transaction multiples, all in a format directly usable for internal board preparation. For a team whose core workflow centres on producing Gate 1 documents, the ability to generate a structured, investment-banking-quality analysis on demand represented a meaningful step change.

The team estimated that producing a comparable analysis manually would take roughly half a working day per report. With around 25 to 30 board submissions per year, of which the majority involve this type of target analysis, the cumulative time saving is significant. The estimate of roughly half an FTE per year came directly from the team’s own assessment during the evaluation.

The platform is used for:

Impact in practice:

I think if I do the math, that saves about half a person per year, because we produce quite a lot of these. Not a bad result at all.

Compared to the Invens and Gratas of this world, you’re already in a completely different league. They say, here’s a database, here’s some great information - fine. But what I care about is getting that into my workflow in an automated way. That’s really what it comes down to.

Super cool. These are exactly the things we need.