my former employer that i quit 2 years ago due to PE ownership, is in the process of closing the medical device manufacturing facility i worked at. PE will, of course, make money due to the move, well over 100 good paying jobs lost, and costs to consumers will go up even more. one frustrating and enraging aspect is the guard rails put in place to protect consumers routinely get bulldozed over. see, due to the highly regulated nature of med device manufacturing, there are FDA and customer required contractual rules that a site cannot just shut down on a whim. THIS SPECIFIC location is the site where the product is made on THIS SPECIFIC equipment. any change requires pre-approval from the customer and lengthy, very costly FDA required re-validation of the manufacturing process. PE says fuck that, we're just going to do it. this leaves the customers scrambling to either find a new source, or support re-validation, which costs millions for the many individual products we made. this is quite expensive for "legacy" product that has been on the market for many years, as the protocols are not in place as the process was developed so long ago it was grandfathered in...for this site, a move requires validation to the current standard. typical time line for validation is about 18 months minimum and can stretch into years. plant closure is about 6 months from announcement, so a year gap. there are products required for surgery that we were the sole supplier of that others have tried and failed to make, and even the customer(OEM) does not fully understand how to make due to tribal knowledge. the supply chain will break due to the actions of these vultures. and this is from a PE firm who boasts of it's "life-sciences" bona fides.
often i would step back and note how similar the workings of my company and industry mirrored those of American politics.
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