BPO Centres in Poland

The region of Central and Eastern Europe has enormous potential in the business services sector (i.e. Business Process Outsourcing - BPO). The BPO sector started developing in Poland about 8 years ago, mainly in the field of bookkeeping and finance, IT services and in R&D work. Poland’s main advantages in attracting the type of projects consists in its favourable investment climate, highly qualified human resources and the development of the modern office space market.

Why Poland? It’s important to stress certain facts: currently in Poland there are 10 large academic centres and over 2 million students. Entrepreneurs considering development of outsourcing projects in Poland have thus a variety of potential investment destinations to choose form.

Poland’s qualities as an investment location tend to be highly assessed by a number of reports published by the world’s leading consultancy firms e.g. Ernst&Young.

Among the most successful BPO destinations in Poland there are: Warsaw, Wrocław and Cracow. Over the last five years, these three agglomerations have developed dynamically in the field. Today in Cracow around 4,000 people work in the sector, employed by such companies as: Phillip Morris, Shell, IBM and Lufthansa. A good example of a firm growing dynamically through knowledge is Both Motorola hiring over 900 workers at its research centre and Hewlett Packard with 1000 employees in its Wrocław-based R&D centre are good examples of development-oriented businesses extensively investing in R&D facilities. PAIiIZ report “IT monitor 2007”, shows that the 100 Poland-based centres employed 17,000 workers in 2007. The rport suggests also that other Polish cities, e.g. Lublin, Olsztyn and Szczecin, are equally ready to embrace investments in this sector are fully equipped to follow the example of Wrocław and Cracow.

According to a PAIiIZ report prepared by the Agency’s Foreign Investment Department in October 2008, which analysed 300 Poland-based BPO centres, it is the field of advanced technologies, finance and banking as well as the electronics, car making industry, telecommunications and consulting that offers the largest potential in Poland for the sector’s expansion. At the moment the centres have been hiring round 45,000 people. The research shows that the positive employment tendency in the centres has constantly been on the rise. What is more, declarations made by the authorities of the surveyed canters indicate that in the period between 2007 and 2010 employment in the sector should exceed 70,000.

Business Process Outsourcing is the name of a services sector in which international corporations delegate selected tasks to businesses and newly formed foreign branches abroad. These operations allow companies to reduce their costs and to utilise the often greater human resources in the country where the investment is situated. Lower cost, however, are not the only factor which motivates firms to develop BPO projects. It is the human potential, the so called “HR pool” - the availability and the quality of the highly qualified personnel that is the major factor in attracting an investment to a given location.

Poland can be proud of the wide selection of students, who often achieve leading positions in international competitions, like: the Microsoft Imagine Cup 2008, European Merril Lynch Investment Challenge 2007, or the IBM-ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest 2007, 2008. In these competitions, at which the greatest added value is human resources and ability that are utilised by firms - costs cannot be the sole category assessed.

Poland has a wide range of competitors e.g. India, China, Hungary and Rumania. Still despite the fact that production costs in Poland are higher than in India, the country has proven to be an attractive location for outsourcing centres in Europe.

Amongst Poland’s BPO investors there are:

ABN AMRO (Warszawa),
Accenture (Warszawa, Łódź),
Acxiom (Gdańsk),
AFS (Kraków),
Ahold (Kraków),
Arvato Services (Poznań),
Atos Origin (Bydgoszcz),
Avon (Warszawa),
Bayer (Kraków),
Cap Gemini, Ernst&Young
(Kraków, Wrocław, Katowice),
Carlsberg (Poznan),
Citi Group (Olsztyn, Warszawa, Łódź),
Communication Factory (Kraków),
Compuware (Gdańsk)
Credit Suisse (Wrocław),
CTM Teleperformance (Warszawa),
DHL Logistics (Dabrowa Górnicza),
Dimar (Warszawa),
Electrolux (Kraków),
Ericpol Telecom (Łódź),
Exult (Kraków),
Fiat (Bielsko-Biała),
Fineos (Gdańsk),
First Data Corporation (Gdańsk),
Fujitsu (Łódź),
General Electric (Łódź),  Genpact (Lublin),
Geoban (Gdynia),
GlaxoSmithKline (Poznań),
Guest-Tek (Warszawa),
Hewlett-Packard (Warszawa, Wrocław),
IBM (Gdańsk)
IBM (Warszawa, Kraków),
Indesit (Kraków),
InfosysPhilips (Łódz),
Intel (Gdańsk),
Kainos (Gdańsk)
KPMG (Kraków, Poznań),
Lucent Technologies (Bydgoszcz),
Lufthansa (Kraków),
Lufthansa Systems Poland (Gdańsk)
Philip Morris (Kraków),
QAD (Wrocław),
Shell (Kraków),
State Street Corporation (Kraków),
Thomson Reuters (Warszawa, Gdynia),
TietoEnator (Szczecin),
TNT Express (Warszawa),
UniCredit (Szczecin),
Volvo (Wrocław),
Wipro (Wrocław),
Zensar (Gdańsk)

source: PAIiIZ