Caslon’s Rab Govil, CEO of PODi, explained that “today's challenge for developing and delivering direct marketing materials is how to address the complex collaboration among a wide range of geographically and corporately diverse participants. Production represents only 10 percent of the cycle time for delivering direct marketing materials with the other 90 percent involving activities like coordination, content management, versioning, data processing, testing, and approvals."

The proposed model allows for unprecedented collaboration between all the parties involved in the supply chain, with benefits including:

• Reduced cycle time through elimination of manual handoffs and translations between workflow steps.
• Reduced cost through efficient collaboration between all parties in the supply chain—enterprise, agencies, and production providers.
• Error reduction through automation

The new Cloud consortium will hold its first meeting in Q2 2012.