Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2006 im Fachbereich BWL - Unternehmensführung, Management, Organisation, Note: 1,0, Universität Wien (Institut für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik), 120 Quellen im Literaturverzeichnis, Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: M&A activities are widely seen as a magic bullet to improve ones own position in an increasingly competitive environment. In 2006 more deals will be concluded than ever before. However, nearly all existing studies about merger success have shown the same results: only very few deals create meaningful value while half of all mergers actually destroy value. The main hypothesis of this master's thesis is that there is a high correlation between merger success and the way the supply chains of the two merging companies are integrated. Moreover supply chain management and mergers & acquisitions are two management instruments that - if used appropriately - highly support each other. In other words: supply chain management will make or break post-merger performance of a firm. The results of a survey conducted in the German speaking countries confirmed this assumption and give interesting insights in best practices of successful M&A management. However, in the M&A reality supply chain management still plays an insignificant role. It must be the aim to boost the scholarly discussion about this topic as well as its attention in practice. To determine supply chain synergies a new concept is presented. It is based on the SCOR-model (Supply Chain Operations Reference-model) and helps to analyze possible synergies with the focus on the optimization of the whole supply chain. Also, important measures and their synchronization over the M&A process to efficiently and effectively integrate the supply chains are discussed.