Central America Teams 2019
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Our team is small but our culture is characterised by doing more with less. Our team for the Central American markets is currently composed of myself and law student Santiago Neira who reports to me. Neira has been key in completing tasks, raising the bar and mitigating the risks in our department for the Central America region. His support has allowed me to focus on more strategic functions within my role. I am currently in charge of Latin America except for Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela. A big part of our challenges are focused on Central America and Costa Rica specifically where we have our manufacturing site and the biggest number of employees.
We have been effective in consolidating our portfolios in the Central American region and formalising agreements in countries where the relationships with the distributors had been verbal, being able to mitigate risks and have a more clear path on our obligations and defining better our rights as well as creating more legal security for the company. We have also been involved in the acquisition of equipment for the company in order to be able to expand our production, and negotiating our expansion locally.
The recent modification to the tax law, as well as the implementation of the electronic invoicing in Costa Rica. We had to prepare ourselves to be able to comply with the requirements on time and change our invoicing system while we work with some systems which are not so modern.
In addition, we had to understand the risks we faced with the implementation of the modification of the tax law and the changes we needed to implement internally in order to prevent any breaches.
The main focus for us is always growth and doing the right thing. Therefore, we plan to continue supporting our company grow locally and internationally with the minimum risks possible.
In addition, we are trying to formalise old relationships that come from way back in order to have our company in a stronger and clearer position with clear terms and conditions. We are also working on implementing better controls and training on matters regarding ethics and compliance as well as company policies in order to guarantee that we are always on the correct path.
We work with a good system to help control our contracts and the different versions of these.
We also have a bar code which controls the final version to prevent any changes and this tool also gives access to the contract to interested users.
We are definitely a very pro-business legal team. Trying always to find the best and safest solution for the company to do business and grow within the market, we are constantly trying to be a partner to the different teams and have them understand that we are here to help them reach their targets in the correct way.
At Kraft Heinz we have small but very efficient teams, which gives us the possibility to be involved in many aspects and areas of the company. We have acquired a very important insight of the business and how we can help them rather than block their growth. We have been able to learn from different areas of law in many countries throughout Latin America, which gives us the opportunity to benchmark from other jurisdictions as well as learning from past situations. This has also become a strength for us since we can help connect areas and provide strong solutions for the company, integrating ourselves more each day into the growth of the company and becoming key partners for the different teams.
