San Francisco - Streamline Solutions, developers of the PrintStream business management solution for Marketing Service Providers (MSPs), is launching a new campaign to help businesses to understand and overcome the challenges of "PMF Convergence".

PMF Convergence is the process of merging disparate marketing service offerings -- print, mail and fulfillment workflows -- into a single, automated business process. "Everybody is telling the printing industry to offer more services to their customers," says Laurence Snyder, President of Streamline Solutions. "Printing companies, mail houses, service bureaus, direct mailers, they are all investing millions of dollars into personnel and equipment to expand from their traditional service offering. They are adding more capabilities like digital print, variable insertion, mail and email, TransPromo, POD, comingling and postal sort, pick and pack fulfillment, you name it. Then they realize that running new workflows are a lot different from what they are used to, and that concurrently managing all these new processes can be difficult, complex, and daunting. In many cases, businesses are running large, multi-faceted marketing campaigns with little or no idea where their costs and margins may lie within parts of their own service offerings. These companies need a way to integrate and manage all of their print, mail and fulfillment processes so that each and every job process can be measured, optimized and made more profitable."

With a sound PMF Convergence strategy, MSPs can integrate their disparate print, mail and fulfillment workflows into a single process that they can manage more effectively. Sales people can better handle pricing and estimating a wide variety of services. Managers can track what is happening on the shop floor at all times and CSRs can have all of the information they need on any one job or campaign in real time. Inventory can be more effectively be monitored and controlled. Accounting can more easily report on personnel and machine costs, and can invoice for services more quickly and accurately. Manual and redundant processes can be automated and streamlined. Estimating, buyouts, job ticketing, inventory, job costing, production scheduling, ganging, postage accounting, reporting and invoicing – all of these functions can be integrated so that companies can handle greater volumes most efficiently and keep a sharper focus on costs and profits.

The benefits of PMF Convergence are enormous, but so are the challenges. Many companies don't know where to start. That is why Streamline Solutions is offering its expertise to help companies map out how they might benefit from their own PMF Convergence Plan. Any MSP that contacts Streamline Solutions will be offered a free PMF Convergence Needs Assessment by a qualified expert who will identify and prioritize the challenges and benefits a PMF Convergence Plan might offer that particular business.