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January 22, 2001 |
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Editor: Karyl Scott (kscott@cmp.com)
Faster Due Diligence
For any company that's gone through the due-diligence process during a merger or acquisition, the value of Digital Lighthouse Corp.'s new Web-based Digital Deal Room should be clear. The product creates a secure, customized Web portal where the parties involved in a deal can exchange necessary information, subject to their predefined set of user-access rules. This streamlined, easily customized setup can shave weeks off the due-diligence process. Digital Deal Room also provides a built-in audit trail that can reduce the liability of the third-party firm controlling the rules of access.
Digital Deal Room is one new part of the Digital Lighthouse customer-relationship management platform, which also includes technologies from several well-established vendors. Document-management software from Documentum Inc. is used to create, approve, and publish Web content. E-commerce interaction-management software from ActionPoint Inc. is used to rapidly build and deploy dynamic, intelligent Web interactions between customers and E-commerce systems. Digital Lighthouse has also partnered with Cisco Systems for customer-interaction tools that integrate enterprise data, voice, and video to communication centers.
Research among Digital Deal Room's customers indicates that up to 45% of the time involved in the due-diligence process typically is devoted to exchanging appropriate documents among the participating parties. Using a portal can reduce the typical merger-and-acquisition cycle by weeks. Digital Lighthouse also estimates that digitizing the due-diligence process can provide cost savings of as much as $10 million a year for a midsize firm that deals with mergers and acquisitions. Albert Ray Edwards, the company's managing director of professional services, says that for every merger there are three to four deals that fall apart, making the exacting control and documentation of the audit trail a strategic feature and a competitive advantage for any firm dealing with mergers and acquisitions.
--Kristina Joukhadar Illustration by James Yang
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