Growing by acquisition? Here's how one group scaled without losing control over it's data.
Acquisitions are one of the fastest ways to grow a company, but it can have a significant impact on data processes. Every deal brings a new business running its own finance system, operational software and HR tools, each capturing the same information differently and none of it speaking to what you already run. The integration bill comes due immediately, and it lands on the data team.
The companies that scale cleanly are the ones that stop treating every acquisition as a one-off. Connecting systems deal by deal is slow, manual, and error-prone and can lead to unreliable group reporting.
The good news is that this is a solved problem, and the approach that solves it is repeatable. Here's why it happens, what a scalable approach looks like, and how one group runs it across 450+ locations.
Why can data get harder to manage after an acquisition?
It's tempting to blame the systems themselves, but that's rarely where the problem starts. The difficulty comes down to two things: how those systems are connected, and how each business records its data.
1. The way the systems are connected
When a new application turns up, the obvious move is to plug it straight into the ones it needs to talk to. That works for the first couple. But these one-to-one connections add up quickly — every new system and every new acquisition brings a few more, until there are too many for anyone to keep track of, let alone monitor from one place.
When something breaks, it can take a while to spot, because no one has the full picture. After enough acquisitions, you're left with reporting you can't fully trust and an IT team that can't say for certain what's running.
2. The way each business records its data
Every business you bring on has its own way of recording the same things — the same customer, product or location, each logged slightly differently. So even once the systems are connected, the numbers don't always line up, and those mismatches feed straight into group reporting.
How do data teams keep acquisition data under control?
You don't need a new plan for every deal. A consistent, repeatable approach to integrating data makes onboarding new businesses faster and more transparent — and gets you accurate, reliable data flowing sooner. Here are five principles that help streamline the process:
1. One integration layer in the middle.
Route everything through a single hub instead of wiring apps directly together — all in one place, monitored, under IT's control.
2. Build a flow once, reuse it.
Set up how a type of system connects once, then roll it out to the next acquisition instead of starting over.
3. Validate data on the way in.
Catch and standardize mismatches before they hit your reports.
4. Monitor from day one.
Dashboards and alerts, so you spot problems before an executive does, and reporting stays reliable
5. Keep it visible.
A shared process anyone can pick up — not locked in one person's head.
Each new acquisition becomes a repeatable step, not a scramble to integrate new data systems, and it enables the business to scale.
A real-world example: how one fast-growing group integrates data after every acquisition
Van Mossel Automotive Group is one of the largest automotive companies in the Benelux: 6,700+ employees, 450+ branches across six countries, and more than 170,000 cars sold a year. Part of that growth has come through acquisition, and each new business arrives with its own systems to integrate.
The problem: When manual data integration breaks down at scale
In the early days, integrating an acquisition was a physical job. The team would, as CIO Koenraad Bruins puts it, "get a van, fill it with IT equipment, go to the new dealership and rebuild everything to the Van Mossel IT system."
That worked when deals were small and occasional. As they grew larger, more frequent and cross-border, it didn't.
The bigger issue sat underneath. Systems were wired together one-to-one, with no central oversight, and the group had grown to more than 100 applications across 400+ locations — each recording the same things in its own way.
How Van Mossel made acquisition data integration repeatable
Van Mossel made CloverDX the single integration layer in the middle of every data exchange — exactly the goal their CIO set: "to make sure that CloverDX is in the middle of all those integrations." Instead of a tangle of direct connections, everything now runs through one place the team can build, run and monitor — more than 13,000 data tasks every week.
That turned onboarding a new acquisition from a one-off project into a repeatable step:
Central dashboards, visual data flows and error alerts mean problems get caught early, and standardized, validated data now feeds reliable group-wide reporting.
As BI Manager, Nachalle Kortrink of Van Mossel Automotive Group puts it, that's what keeps leadership in control:
Want more details?
Read more about the full Van Mossel Automotive Group case study.
Staying in control as you grow
The takeaway from Van Mossel Automotive Group is simple: the businesses that scale cleanly don't reinvent their data integration for every deal. They put one monitored data layer in the middle and make onboarding each new acquisition a repeatable step — so growth stops being a data problem.
Currently growing by acquisition?
CloverDX can help you keep all new systems under control by turning one-off integrations into
a repeatable onboarding flow as you scale.
If your business is growing by acquisition and the data is getting harder to control, book a demo to see how CloverDX could help — or read the full Van Mossel story.
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