ACP Pharma opens BPO centre in Rzeszow

2010-08-02

ACP Pharma on 30 July opened a shared service centre in Rzeszow in Southeastern Poland. The facility, equipped at a cost of PLN 1m (€0.25m), employs nearly 80 people, drawn mainly from the staff of Cefarm Reszow. It will provide bookkeeping services to all ACP Pharma subsidiaries in Poland. But there are plans to expand its role further. The company’s CEO Janusz Pietruszka said that the centre was the first European facility of this type within Mediq (ACP Pharma’s parent company based in the Netherlands), and that in the future it could also serve Mediq subsidiaries in other parts of Europe as well as third-party customers. The first external customers to be served by the centre will be members of ACP Pharma’s franchise pharmacy network.
The company selected Rzeszow for several reasons, notably economic conditions in the Podkarpackie region and a large pool of university graduates.
ACP Pharma is the third major drug distributor in Poland to establish a business process outsourcing (BPO) unit. Late last year Polska Grupa Farmaceutyczna (PGF) set up Business Support Solutions, 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, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Great Britain, with plans to serve external customers as well. And in July Neuca (formerly Torfarm) announced the creation of Accedit, 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) and will also serve Neuca’s partner pharmacies as well as external customers.