IMS - Meeting Customer Needs Through Integrations

Integrated Marketing Solutions (IMS) is one of the largest providers of point of sale and premium materials in North America, providing strategic sourcing, program management, warehousing and fulfillment to Fortune 200 companies.

As part of their service portfolio, IMS offers online solutions that meet the unique and extensive requirements of point of sales materials procurement in a business to business environment. When they purchased Pageflex Storefront four and a half years ago, they recognized that Storefront’s extensibility would allow them to combine print on demand with other IMS capabilities, such as demand planning, budget and allocation control, procurement consolidation, multi-ship ordering and consolidation, and more. In fact, they saw an integrated offering as an ideal solution to meet the constantly growing need for creating and automating the process of ordering on demand point of sale, marketing and sales materials.

IMS started by defining business goals and architectural goals for the project:

• Create an easy-to-use and seamless shopping experience for end users
• Link Pageflex document customization and POD orders with the IMS sales system so that print orders could be fulfilled while the catalog, ordering processing and invoicing would remain in the system of record
• Integrate IMS capabilities such as budgeting with POD
• Ensure that the architectural design was flexible and re-usable for future capabilities and for additional clients
• Leverage each application’s core strengths – using Pageflex for variable document output, and other systems to manage order processing

The resulting integrated solution provides a seamless print on demand document customization and purchasing experience for end users along with full backend integration with the IMS ERP system. Document customization is presented as a logical step and view within the point of sale application, ensuring ease of use for IMS customers.

IMS took full advantage of several Pageflex APIs and integration points to accomplish their goals, including the Storefront Incoming Interface (SINI), the Storefront Extension Interface (SXI), JSini, HTML inserts, and the Storefront Punch Out Extension.

“To date, the project has met or exceeded all goals,” comments John-David Bennett, IMS Application Development Manager. “ It has allowed us to reduce duplicate and manual efforts, and gives our clients the ability to leverage IMS budgeting capabilities to control their POD expenses. Best of all, our customers are extremely pleased with the solution.”

We congratulate IMS on their creative and thoughtful use of Pageflex in conjunction with other tools to provide a unique customer solution!