The Sourcing Group Brings More Power to Enterprise Strategy Solutions with EFI MarketDirect StoreFront

The need for a powerful web-to-print solution

The MarketDirect StoreFront platform creates ecommerce sites that can be branded and customized for specific clients, companies, or departments. It integrates with EFI MIS/ERP workflow systems for full end-to-end business integration, and with EFI’s MarketDirect software for cross-media customer engagement and campaign management. An application programming interface (API) also supports open platform integration. TSG is establishing bi-directional communications integration between EFI MarketDirect StoreFront and the company’s existing third-party ERP system using the API available from EFI.

TSG had not dealt with EFI before, but it soon realized it had found the solution it needed to undertake the consolidation and integration task required for its new health care client. “Everything we’ve done is geared around EFI’s StoreFront platform,” says Bill Ellis, VP of Health Care Services for TSG. “We took multiple facilities and put them on one network. We now can give our client the price, service, and transparency they need, and we can hold prices consistently across various regions. We can also document and show them the savings.”

Integrating TSG’s MarketDirect StoreFront platform required adding more than 10,000 products to the system, including labels, forms, marketing items, apparel, and promo items. Items were broken down in several categories, and further refined by customized access to facilities based on the needs of different locations. The system accommodates 5,300 users from the health care provider, in addition to hundreds of certified trade partners.

Online job submissions that originate from TSG’s client are routed directly to third-party suppliers, while TSG tracks all request for quotes and transactions, discerns trends, checks production status, monitors and manages inventory, and performs the accounting functions. The system is also fully transparent to client users. A key attraction was MarketDirect StoreFront’s ability to add the health provider’s 13 in-plant shops into the system as well — something other Web-to-print platforms couldn’t execute.

“Basically, anything that’s required inside a hospital is accessible on the system,” says Ellis.

Adding to the effectiveness of the Web-to-print system is EFI SmartCanvas, a web-based design tool within MarketDirect StoreFront that gives administrators the power to create templates for greeting cards, flyers, brochures, and a host of other products.

According to Caan, “MarketDirect StoreFront with SmartCanvas manages the complete customer experience, which gives TSG unlimited capability to expand our suite of services.”