Clicking with your customers

Online retailing has been a blessing for everyone from the behemoths of Amazon and eBay to tiny mail-order businesses, which have found a new lease on life thought electronic ordering. Major printing groups and print management companies have well-established online portals for their blue-chip customers. So is web-to-print (W2P) an exercise in scale for the muscular end of the industry, or can a small guy get in on the ground floor?

Systems integrator Bruce Manderson runs Fuse IT, a Brisbane outfit that packages transactional print programs, including those of local vendor Online Print Solutions (OPS), into Oracle and SAP-based IT systems. Fuse IT’s clients are in the printing industry, mainly print management companies, that want links with customers and other providers.

Upstream customers include large corporations, such as Flight Centre’s 1,600 stores, Queensland Rail’s 600 outlets, and OneSteel, with an effective user base of 3,000 Australia-wide. OPS also sells direct, but Fuse IT comes in where there is that demand for higher-end integration.