Strategic acquisition management: A multi-objective synergistic approach

Of all the strategic planning and decision-making a corporation undertakes, a merger or acquisition of another company is one of the most important and complex. The complexity is due not only to the volume of accounting, finance, marketing and management factors that need to be considered, but also to synergistic factors that are not adequately incorporated in current acquisition planning models. This paper presents a goal-programming modelling approach to deal with the problem of strategic acquisition planning for mergers, acquisitions or joint ventures. A goal-programming model is developed and applied to illustrate its use in acquisition decision-making. The results of the paper demonstrate the model’s informational efficiency of application and unique ability to include synergistic decision-making factors.