Accenture (NYSE:ACN) has agreed to acquire Enterprise System Partners (ESP), a consulting and manufacturing services provider for the life sciences industry.
Headquartered in Cork, Ireland, ESP will join Accenture’s digital manufacturing arm, Industry X.0, to boost Accenture’s efforts to transform manufacturing for pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device clients globally.
ESP has long-standing experience in planning and implementing manufacturing solutions, with niche expertise in manufacturing execution systems (MES) and serialization. MES digitally track and document the production process, providing the groundwork for more automated and analytics-driven manufacturing and supply chains. Serialization allows life science companies to digitally track each saleable unit from the packaging line all the way to the patient.
“Digital technologies are fundamentally transforming the factory floor. With ESP’s manufacturing solutions and our Industry X.0 capabilities, we can help clients take advantage of engineering and product lifecycle management, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence for a flexible, efficient, and cost-effective production process,” said Ben Salama, a managing director for Accenture Industry X.0 in the United Kingdom & Ireland, in a prepared statement.
ESP will be the latest of several acquisitions Accenture has made recently to expand Accenture Industry X.0 in Europe and North America, including embedded software company Pillar Technology (U.S.), hardware engineering firm Mindtribe (U.S.), and strategic design consultancy Designaffairs.
The ESP deal will complement life sciences acquisitions that Accenture has made in recent years, including that of LabAnswer in 2017, now the Accenture Scientific Informatics Services (ASIS) business, which helps capture, manage, and analyze complex laboratory and scientific data.
Founded in 2003, ESP employs 200 and services 17 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical and biotech companies from offices in Ireland, France, the Netherlands, Puerto Rico, Turkey and the United States.
