Carve-Out and TSA Exit
Challenge
A global leader in energy resilience, operating across seven international sites with a workforce of 10,000, approached Nota Consulting eight months into their carve-out from a multinational kitchen and bath design company. The carve-out was part of a transition to ownership by a private equity firm managing $50 billion in assets.
The client faced a critical risk: they were unlikely to fully separate their applications, infrastructure, analytics, and cybersecurity functions within the 12-month Transition Services Agreement (TSA). They needed to quickly shift away from the slow, cumbersome approach of a Big Four consulting firm. Failure to exit the TSA on time would result in additional costs of $4 million per month for the buyer.
Approach
We began with a full assessment of existing workstreams, reviewing 137 project plans and identifying misaligned timelines, missing milestones, and critical gaps. From there, we established a streamlined governance framework focusing on execution versus report outs and brought visibility and accountability to every project in scope.
Daily working sessions were held with Infrastructure, Applications, and Cybersecurity teams to maintain focus and alignment. In parallel, our team ran 16 detailed project schedule reviews each day to track progress from Design, UAT, Cutover, Go Live, and Hypercare. We managed resources from five consulting firms, the buyer and the seller’s IT teams, across multiple geographies, creating a single coordinated view of execution.
Throughout the engagement, we maintained a live risk and issue log with over 380 entries. We led the migration of 900 applications, including SAP, Ariba, Workday, Salesforce, and Mulesoft, as well as critical factory and user devices. Cutovers were coordinated globally, ensuring continuity across the seller and buyer’s teams, and in alignment with manufacturing to limit unnecessary downtime.
With a dual-datacenter environment across Chicago and Dallas, we supported the final sync of 191 SAP NAS shares and coordinated the configuration of over 500 file shares. We oversaw the redomaining of 483 servers and ensured endpoint security coverage with CrowdStrike and Zscaler.
We maintained communication with the client’s leadership team throughout, providing clear updates as applications went live and ensuring visibility during a rapidly evolving transition. Serving as the liaison between the seller and the buyer throughout the process, we executed 1,400 business record exchanges, managed monthly forecasts and invoices, and coordinated required resourcing.
Following the successful TSA exit, we supported a two-week hypercare phase, addressing all outstanding risks and stabilizing IT operations. During this time, our team closed roughly 3,100 open tasks across 110 implementation plans, 26 UAT defect logs, 50 hypercare issue logs, and 29 cutover plans.
At the same time, we designed and launched the client’s new IT Project Management Office. This included delivery of governance frameworks, project tools, and a Smartsheet-based PPM and resource management system built to support long-term execution as an independent company.
Impact
• 12-month TSA exited successfully
• 137 project plans executed
• 900 applications migrated
• 340 vendor contracts signed
• 1,000 factory devices migrated
• 8,000 end user devices migrated
• 191 SAP NAS shares synced
• 507 file shares configured and operational
• 483 servers redomained
• Smartsheet PMO stood up for ongoing delivery