Industrial Distribution

A Scalable Job Architecture for a Multi-Acquisition Firm

A distributor that doubled its workforce over three years through acquisition.

We put every role in the combined company on one leveling framework and fixed pay-band gaps for about a fifth of the workforce before they became grievances.

~20%

Of the workforce had pay-band inconsistencies resolved before any grievance

Situation

A job architecture is a common set of levels, defined by factors such as scope of responsibility, decision authority and organizational impact. Every role is mapped to it, whichever legacy company the role came from. Until that layer exists, a company cannot even measure whether pay and titles are consistent.

This distributor had integrated each acquisition as a one-off. People doing comparable work sat in different pay bands under different titles. That pattern is an internal fairness problem, and it is also the fact pattern that comes up in pay-equity reviews. With a fourth deal in discussion, repeating the approach would have deepened the exposure.

What we did

We built one architecture for the combined organization and mapped every role to it, legacy and newly acquired. Levels were based on what the job involves, not the title it inherited. We also modeled the capacity the company would need against its three-year growth plan.

Element	Before	After
Titles	Inherited from each acquired company	Mapped to common levels based on scope and decision authority
Pay bands	Separate bands per legacy company	One band structure, with gaps identified and corrected
Next acquisition	Handled deal by deal	A template that maps incoming roles to existing levels

Impact

Roughly one in five employees had a pay-band inconsistency corrected. The corrections were made before any of them escalated to a formal grievance.
The company now has an integration template, so the next acquisition starts from the architecture instead of a blank page.
Workforce capacity is planned against growth targets three years out, which gives the company room to keep acquiring without recreating the same gaps.

What made it work

Mapped with the people who know the work

Functional leaders from each legacy company did the role mapping with us. They knew the real scope of each job, and their involvement meant the levels were accepted when published.

Results

Pay-band inconsistencies resolved for approximately one-fifth of employees

A repeatable integration template for future acquisitions

A workforce plan tied to the three-year growth targets

Engagement facts

Sector: Industrial Distribution
Practice area: Transformation & Organization
Client profile: Distributor that doubled headcount through acquisition
Services: Job architecture, role leveling, workforce planning
Key phases: Joint role mapping; three-year workforce plan

This case study is a composite drawn from multiple engagements. Client details have been changed and combined to protect confidentiality, and figures are representative rather than attributable to any single client.