by
Thomas Dworetzky, Contributing Reporter | August 30, 2017
Philips will establish a center of expertise in Middle Tennessee.
The move will create about 800 new jobs in the Nashville area, according to Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and Department of Economic and Community Development Commissioner Bob Rolfe.
“The consolidation of our business services will help us to deliver on our continuous improvement goals, with a particular focus on our customer experience, while leveraging the benefits of the growing health technology ecosystem in Tennessee to accelerate patient care,” Craig Gruchacz, Global Business Services leader for North America at Philips said in a statement.
The new jobs count and consolidation does not include about 200 Philips employees already in its health technology division in Nashville and Franklin,
according to the Nashville Post.
The move was helped by policies Tennessee has put in place to make it more appealing to international business. “Philips’ investment in Middle Tennessee continues our state’s strong growth trajectory and moves us closer to making Tennessee the No. 1 location in the Southeast for high quality jobs,” Haslam advised.
“It’s no secret that Nashville has long been a health care hub,” he said at the state capitol,
according to the Springhill News website. “We’re famous around the world for that. One of the things that has started to happen is that people are starting to think, 'well this area can be a home for a lot more.' We have long thought that, particularly, health care technology was a natural for this area.”
Plans call for Philips to place key business functions including commercial operations, customer service, finance, HR, IT, marketing, procurement, and quality and regulatory affairs at the new location.
This consolidates into a single U.S. location a number of present and future acquisitions by the company to generate efficiencies and standardize various business functions.
According to Rolfe, a trip personally made by Haslam and his agency to Amsterdam to meet with Philips execs in June helped seal the deal. It said to the company, he stressed, “that we will travel the globe to recruit exceptional international companies such as Philips.”
At the announcement of the deal, Philips' Gruchacz noted that roughly 85 percent of Tennessee hospitals use at least one piece of Philips imaging equipment, and said the reasons behind choosing Tennessee were “the business environment, the climate and the health care ecosystem you’ve created here.”
That ecosystem was key, he added, because, “health care is complicated, and no single company can address the U.S. health care system alone,” stressing that, “we need to work together. We need to unlock the collective genius of data, technology and the most important asset, people.”
