I work on the Merger’s and Acquisitions team for my company and our main projects when it comes to purchasing an outside company is to integrate and remediate the company to our standards. Generally we use a gantt chart to track the closure of our main deliverables for the project itself but the major milestones within the project plan are captured in an integration and remediation quality plan. Other than that there are no other fancy software used in order to track these tasks to closure. During integration, we generally on board their outsourced suppliers for whatever the product portfolio we purchased onto our approved supplier list usually through audits. Additionally ensure FDA registration compliance of all the products, verify validations performed on different processes, and verify the supply chain is performed through the integration portion of an acquired company. On the remediation side, there is a bit more deep dive into the design side of the product portfolio, such updating prints, updating manufacturing processes, or even updating the product itself if need be through minor modifications.
Overall for being a big company, I would have expected a little bit more of a robust project management process. The biggest lack there seems to be is communication. Upper management seems to withhold crucial information from project managers that deal with the integration and remediation phases of the project which puts unneeded pressure upon the project team itself. On paper, there seems to be a lot of awareness however the chain of communication seems to get murky at times and can drastically shift the timeline. The project goals and objectives have been clearly been defined but in terms of updates or potential roadblocks, those issues were not properly communicated and causes a lot of back up and potential delays to product launch into the market which can affect the overall profit of the products.