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It was a complicated transaction that Ingersoll Rand\u2019s then-CEO Mike Lamach challenged his finance and operations people to address by \u201cturning over every rock in the company\u201d to nullify the possibility of unforeseen snags.

Recalls Chris Kuehn, who at the time served as Ingersoll Rand\u2019s chief accounting officer: \u201cI remember Mike coming back and telling us that he had never been through an IPO in his career, but this transaction was likely going to be the closest he ever got to one.\u201d

Today, Kuehn is CFO of Trane Technologies, the spinoff and resulting offspring of the transaction that involved the merger of Ingersoll Rand\u2019s industrial business, Milwaukee-based Gardner Denver.

\u201cMike didn\u2019t want us to accept the status quo. He wanted us to review every one of the 600 cost centers and every organizational chart and function,\u201d continues Kuehn, who adds that the exhaustive process spanned between six and nine months.

Part of engineering the spinoff\u2019s early success, Kuehn explains, involved proactively moving processes that had been managed centrally to regional locations where they would be better suited for the management of the entity\u2019s future operations. \xa0\xa0

Still, putting a reorganization in motion on the eve of a defining transaction is no doubt a tricky management feat, especially when the dimensions of the proposed spinoff are not yet fully visible to the company\u2019s incumbent employees. \xa0

According to Kuehn, the approaching transaction deadlines brought an operational opportunity into view.

He comments: \u201cWe said, \u2018Let\u2019s be courageous enough to change what has not been working, with a bias to moving those processes that are centrally led.\u2019\u201d

For Kuehn, the reorganization and eventual 2019 transaction swung open the door to Trane\u2019s CFO office, where the finance and operational opportunity remains front-and-center.

\u201cWe\u2019re still on the journey today,\u201d he points out. \u201cWe\u2019re not done, but this has certainly allowed me to get inside the finance function as well as our other global functions and see what is working well and what we need to change.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0