Neuca gets EU grant for establishing a BPO unit

2010-07-13

Neuca (formerly Torfarm) announced that it has been awarded an EU grant worth PLN 11m (€2.7m) from the Ministry of the Economy. The money will be used to help fund the creation of a shared service and IT centre that will centralise all back-office operations within the group, including finance, IT, administration, controlling, human resources and payroll. The unit, to be named Accedit, will also serve Neuca’s partner pharmacies. It will ultimately employ 260 people.
The grant represents 30% of the estimated labour costs over the first two years of Accedit’s operation.
The creation of Accedit will enable Neuca to reap the full benefits of its increased scale built up through a series of acquisitions and expansion into new pharma and healthcare areas. The group expects substantial efficiency gains from the integration of administrative and logistics functions. The process will involve a major reduction of non-core jobs at its various units, with plans to reduce group headcount by almost half, to 1,400, by 2013.
In the future, Accedit is to provide services to external customers as well.
Neuca is not the first major drug distributor in Poland to establish a BPO unit. Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna (PGF) late last year set up Business Support Solutions (BSS), which has a shared service centre in the Lodz Special Economic Zone providing finance, accounting, legal and controlling services to PGF and 150 related companies in Poland and abroad (e.g. in Lithuania, the Netherlands and Great Britain), with plans to serve external customers as well.