The company, which is 300 creating new jobs, has been building up a presence quietly, writes SUZANNE LYNCH

A HOST of business leaders, politicians and academics filed into a crammed conference room in the headquarters of Abtran at the University Technology Park just outside Cork city earlier this week.

The occasion was the announcement of the creation of 300 “high-value” jobs by the business outsourcing company. The presence of two Ministers and a local TD underlined the significance of the news.

Abtran has been building up a presence in corporate Ireland quietly. It may lack the big-name familiarity of multinational employers in the Cork area such as Boston Scientific or Pfizer, but it is a major employer, with more than 1,000 staff at its two centres in Cork.

Nonetheless, the nature of the work – business process outsourcing – is difficult to conceptualise.

Established in 1997, Abtran is Ireland’s largest business process outsourcing company. “Essentially, we provide a range of process services to large private- and public-sector companies,” says Abtran chief executive Michael Fitzgerald. “This includes finance and administration services, as well as traditional call-centre processes, or what we describe as non-voice services and front or voice services.”

The company’s customers include Aviva, ESB, BSkyB and An Post. It also provides services to eToll on behalf of the National Roads Authority.

Inside the Bishopstown headquarters rows of employees, mostly in their 20s and 30s, work the phones and computers.

But the company is much more than a traditional call centre, Fitzgerald says. “What sets us apart is our focus on innovation. Our aim is to give a more efficient, better service to our customers. It’s all about enhancing business processes, making them more efficient, [and] thereby giving our customers a competitive advantage.”

The company invests heavily in research and development. Last year it opened a €6 million Enterprise Ireland-backed learning and innovation centre, dedicated to the research, development and the testing of new technologies and services.

Recently, it also entered a research partnership with the Cork Constraint Computation Centre (4C) at UCC, which is seeking to develop next-generation systems for use in business process outsourcing.

It is this focus on innovation that gives Abtran a competitive advantage, Fitzgerald says, allowing it to compete internationally with other low-cost service providers such as outsourcing companies in India. “We don’t compete on costs. What we’re offering is a value-added service. Cost will always be an issue, but we offer a different kind of service.”

Many of Abtran’s customers have contracts with international low-cost service providers as well, he says. “There’s room in the market for both.”

Fitzgerald says the firm’s strong customer focus and collaboration with clients are among its main selling points. “We are strongly integrated with our clients. The way we see it, if our customers grow, we grow. If we can make things better for our clients, our relationship with them will be sustainable in the long term.”

This interconnection between client and service provider is enhanced by the fact that Abtran assigns a dedicated group of employees to work on each account. Similarly, clients such as Aviva and ESB have a number of their own staff members working onsite at Abtran.

Abtran is the kind of company State agencies such as Enterprise Ireland are targeting. Irish-owned, export-focused and – in terms of scale and employee numbers – lying somewhere between multinationals and small and medium enterprises, it epitomises the “value-added” enterprise at the heart of the Government’s smart economy vision.

Abtran has big plans. It hopes to double turnover, which is projected to be in excess of €40 million in 2010, within three to four years. In particular, it intends to increase its international presence, which currently represents about 35 per cent of turnover.

Globally, business process outsourcing is a €3 billion to €4 billion industry, according to Fitzgerald. Ireland is a minor player, with an estimated 4,000 people working in the sector. Abtran intends to tap into the industry’s potential. This week’s announcement of 300 new jobs by 2012, at a time of acute economic slowdown, suggests it is on the right track.