We’ve been having a discussion about compliance: why it matters and how you can see it as not just a necessity but as a ‘mother of invention,’ – a way to sharpen up your business processes, and as a ‘free’ benefit of putting all you need in place to be compliant. Here’s another benefit that not everyone considers: compliance as self-protection. Both of the big sectors we work in, cosmetics and medical devices, have seen large amounts of consolidation in the past few years.
You will find large cosmetics companies buying niche cosmetics companies and medical device companies doing the same. In fact, a lot of the medical device sector is made up of small businesses; over the years they get acquired into larger organisations’ portfolios. When a large organization acquires the smaller one, they are not just buying the business, e.g. the IP, the customers, the assets – they are also acquiring responsibility. They are now liable for that firm’s mistakes as much as its successes. From the time you buy a company, in other words, if one of its products is in non-compliance, even though you didn't create the original labelling or manufacture it – it is still now your responsibility because you own that business.
Are you ready to cope with that? We speak to customers who say they need to reduce the risk of non-compliance on a range of products that they have just taken responsibility for. You need to be thinking this way, too – and seeing beyond the immediate benefits of any M&A and taking the long-term view. What you need is a plan that will help you get control over that new acquisition – which you can only do if you fully understand the risks, so you can plan to reduce them, and make your acquired asset fully compliant. We are finding a lot of our customers use Kallik solutions to assist with merging the acquisition into their business much more rapidly than would have been otherwise possible.
So that’s just a few insights on compliance – why we have it and why it can help you. I hope you’ve found our discussion interesting and we’d love to know your own views. Do you agree, for example, that you really aren’t compliant until you-know-what hits the fan – or that compliance is a fantastic tool to help in mergers or buyouts? Let us know.
