Mergers & Acquisitions

While merging or acquiring companies in Pharma and Biotech involves legalities, the real complexities lie beyond the signed documents. Metis dives deep to assess redundancies across processes, teams, software, and more, ensuring a smooth and efficient integration.

Mergers include when two or more companies combine to form a single entity, acquisitions include when an entity purchases another entity. 

Within the Pharma and Biotech industries, there is much more beyond just signing of the documentation within mergers and acquisitions. From the workplace standpoint, there are redundancies of team members, processes, procedures, software, web domains, contracts, clients, responsibilities to health authorities, clinical trials, Marketing Authorization Holders, and so many more. 

The focus for Metis within the Mergers and Acquisitions space is on the assessment of redundancies of processes, procedures, software, clients, contracts, and team members. 

An acquired organization will have SOPs defining the process they have been following for compliance with regulatory requirements, who does what, in which order, and what the milestones are for each step along the way. Ideally, a comparison would be done to the acquiring organization documentation, suss out the best of both, and generate new processes and procedures. This is not a quick process, so establishing measurable timeframes and milestones is crucial to the success of the project. The same with team member assignments. Moving too quickly to eliminate head count leaves giant gaps in workflows, but far more importantly, the institutional knowledge of the team members who have actively been involved in setting up processes is critical to have access to while making changes. 

Software is another major part of acquisition and merger. There may be different databases utilized for functions, or even different versions of the same software. How to decide which software to use will generally be a point for IT and management, and it is very important that the IT groups be involved because support of existing systems must be maintained during the process, and all must go through validation before cut over. 

Clients may include internal groups (IT will often have an internal client relationship with the departments and divisions they support, PV and Clinical may have a client to client relationship, etc.). If there are partnerships with external parties, such as business partners with a shared product, those relationships must be supported during the consolidation and reorganization process. 

Compliance with regulations during mergers and acquisitions is the biggest and sometimes most complex piece. Any pain points that either company is working on with an agency becomes the responsibility of the acquiring organization or the entity created upon merger. Even the points that may not have been discovered during the assessment of products and stages of where all of the pieces were, once they are under the umbrella of the new entity, be it by merger or acquisition, the expectation is that the milestones will be met.