ACS will nearly double Vance work force


The planned addition of 75 jobs shows that a call center is fulfilling its mission in Vance County, the head of the local operation said in an interview Tuesday.

Affiliated Computer Services announced Monday that it will consolidate its prescription benefit management (PBM) operations in a 32,000-square-foot building at developer Eddie Ferguson’s Triangle North Corporate Park, off Poplar Creek Road across Interstate 85 from the main campus of Vance-Granville Community College.

ACS opened the call center in the fall of 2003 and has shared the workload with a center in Atlanta. The company is moving those Atlanta operations to Vance County.

Debbie Ruggles, who has run the local ACS center since its beginning, said no more than five people from Atlanta are expected to make the move north, so she will be hiring at least 70 people.

An ACS news release from the corporate headquarters in Dallas said the new jobs will bring the Vance work force to 167 by the end of June, when the call center will be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Ruggles said the company hopes that new contracts and perhaps ACS groups beyond the PBM operation will raise that total to 200 within two years.

ACS is a Fortune 500 company with more than 47,000 people serving corporate and government clients in a range of information technology roles. The Vance County call center is part of ACS State HealthCare Solutions, which processes Medicaid and other health care claims and administers prescription benefits for 17 states.

Among the programs handled at the Vance call center are prescriptions through North Carolina’s Medicaid system and the North Carolina Senior Drug Benefit Program.

The Vance expansion has Ruggles excited. “The whole point of coming and opening this place was to create a better opportunity for people here so they don’t have to drive an hour each way to work in Raleigh to get these kinds of jobs.”

ACS said the new jobs will pay $19,000 to $80,000 per year. Ruggles said most of the starting salaries will be in the range of $19,000 to $22,000, depending on position and experience.

She said the jobs at the bottom of the range will be data-entry positions that don’t require contact with customers.

The bulk of the new jobs will be pharmacy services specialists and drug utilization specialists. Both are groups who answer calls to solve problems with prescription benefits.

The pharmacy services specialists take calls from pharmacists and program participants who can’t get insurance claims for prescriptions to go through their computers. Most of those calls involve Medicaid programs.

Ruggles said she looks for high school graduates with call-center or customer-service experience for those jobs.

The drug utilization specialists step in when the problem with the claim appears to be the amount of the prescription, the frequency of refills or a similar issue with how the prescribed drug is being used.

Ruggles looks for people with experience as pharmacy technicians for those jobs because the specialists need to understand the different types of drugs and how they should be used.

Vance-Granville Community College has played a part in filling those jobs through a pharmacy-tech program it geared to the needs of ACS. Ruggles said she has hired several people from the Vance-Granville program, and others are taking the course now.

She encouraged people without pharmacy experience to consider enrolling in the Vance-Granville program.

“Vance County has been working hard to recruit business,” state Commerce Secretary Jim Fain said in a statement, “and this expansion demonstrates the value of our state’s work force training and development programs.”

ACS will need to add about seven pharmacists to its staff of three at Triangle North, Ruggles said, and she might have to look to the real Triangle to fill those jobs. But she expects most of the rest of the new employees to come from Vance, Warren and Granville counties.

“My peers in other areas have indicated problems finding quality people,” but that hasn’t been Ruggles’ experience. “We’ve got some pretty good people.”

The ACS announcement this week had been in the works for months, and the company has filled 25 of the 75 new jobs at the Vance center, Ruggles said. She plans to bring on the rest of the new workers in batches over the next several months.

Under a corporate ACS contract, Spherion in Raleigh handles the recruitment for the call center. Job applicants can contact Spherion directly (919- 854-9797) or submit resumes at the call center, which will forward them to Spherion.

Aside from periods of expansion, you likely won’t see much demand for fresh workers at ACS because, Ruggles said, the people who sign on tend to stay. “Our turnover rate is exceptionally low for a call center. … It’s probably less than 10 percent.”

ACS also is in the news these days because of a running battle with fellow Texas corporate giant EDS over North Carolina’s Medicaid processing contract, which EDS held for more than a decade but which ACS won last April.

EDS challenged the propriety of the awarding of the five-year, $171 million contract to ACS and won a ruling from an administrative law judge in January that the state should rebid the contract.

State auditors, meanwhile, have accused EDS of overcharging North Carolina by $19 million.
The state’s chief information technology officer, George Bakolia, is due to hear arguments from ACS and EDS next Tuesday. He will decide whether to accept the administrative law judge’s recommendation to rebid the contract.

But none of that bickering in Raleigh should affect ACS in Vance County, Ruggles said. The jobs associated with that Medicaid contract are in Raleigh, and the Vance call center actually serves as a subcontractor to EDS.

“ACS has been a great employer in Vance County,” county Economic Development Director Benny Finch said in a prepared statement. “The addition of the pharmacy operation center has helped jump-start new industry in our area.”

* Note to readers: The editor’s wife works for ACS. We hope we have avoided any bias in this report.