Special Charges

9 Months Ended

Jun. 30, 2020

Special charges are incurred in connection with various transformative initiatives, exit activities, and organizational changes to improve our business alignment and cost structure and are non-recurring in nature. Additional Special charges are expected to be incurred related to restructuring and transformative initiatives in future periods. It is not practicable to estimate the amount of these future expected costs until such time as the evaluations are complete. The following table summarizes the Special charges recognized for the three and nine months ended June 30.


Special Charges	Three Months Ended June 30									Nine Months Ended June 30
			2020			2019			2020			2019
Global information technology transformation	$	6.7		$	—		$	15.3		$	—
Exit activity costs:
Integration-related activities	2.4			4.7			9.2			11.2
Site consolidation	0.4			1.5			1.6			6.5
Total Special Charges	$	9.5		$	6.2		$	26.1		$	17.7

Global Information Technology Transformation

Management pursues opportunities to align our operations to achieve synergies and position the business for growth. In fiscal 2018, a global transformation program was launched that was focused on reducing complexity, increasing efficiency, and improving our cost structure with targeted investments that align with our strategic priorities.

As part of this program, management launched an initiative related to a global information technology transformation, including rationalizing and transforming our enterprise resource planning software solutions and other complementary information technology systems. For the three months ended June 30, 2020, we incurred $9.0 million related to this initiative of which $2.3 million was capitalized and $6.7 million was expensed in Special charges. For the nine months ended June 30, 2020, we incurred $28.3 million related to this initiative of which $13.0 million was capitalized and $15.3 million was expensed in Special charges. The objective of this initiative is to consolidate and streamline our key workstreams that interact with customers and vendors and support our financial reporting processes while maintaining the security of our data. The solutions designed under this initiative will be implemented over the next five to seven years.

Integration-Related Activities

We incurred costs, including severance and benefit costs, associated with other business realignment and integration activities. We acquired several businesses in fiscal 2019 and 2020 as disclosed within Note 4. Business Combinations for which we also continue to incur integration-related costs and severance costs.

Site Consolidation

We continue to streamline our operations and simplify our supply chain by consolidating certain manufacturing and distribution operations (“Site Consolidation”).

For all accrued severance and other benefit charges described above, we record reserves within Other current liabilities. The reserve activity for severance and other benefits for the nine months ended June 30, 2020 was as follows:


Balance as of September 30, 2019	$	8.5
Expenses	4.9
Cash payments	(9.6)
Reversals	(0.5)
Balance as of June 30, 2020	$	3.3