News

TPF Group has announced the appointment of Paul Seaborn as group IT director.

Seaborn will take on TPF’s business process outsourcing (BPO) strategy and manage its core IT needs, including admin and production.

He will assume the new role in July, having spent 12 years prior to that with Polestar, initially in marketing, but more recently as managing director.

During this time, he managed a number of Polestar technical projects, such as its browser-based Httprint print management tool and its recent acquisition of an online pre-press workflow utility.

Seaborn said: “I firmly believe TPF has everything in place to become the dominant force in print-related marketing services. Most of TPF’s expansion plans are underpinned by a strong technology element and a high priority in my new role will be to deliver truly differentiated technology-based solutions, which will further enhance their client proposition.”

BPO analyst firm NelsonHall Research Director Rachael Stormonth told printweek.com that BPO is a growth market.

"Document management BPO is often overlooked area in discussions of business process outsourcing," she said.

"[Our] research shows that the overall document management BPO market in the UK is growing at 12% per annum, with print management the fastest growing element (other elements in this market being inbound document processing, data capture and distribution; infrastructure management; document storage and archival; and transactional print and mail). This is very much a market to watch!

"A few service providers - TPF Group is one of these - have been identifying new opportunities in the growing demand for bundled services (which often include print management) and have been rapidly expanding their capabilities to exploit these opportunities.

"The winners will be those with deep process expertise, standardized tools (eg for workflow and accurate tracking and reporting), and who can demonstrate operational excellence."

TPF Group chief executive Steve Brundle told printweek.com: "The 21st Century end consumer expects communication with them to be via a wide variety of media, which means that if we don’t offer our clients leading edge solutions in all the key marketing services disciplines they’ll simply go elsewhere for them.

"So rather than viewing new technologies and media as some sort of threat, we’ve always regarded it as a way of deepening clients relationships, while also helping to future proof our own business. It may not be a popular thing to for me to say, but personally I believe that most print businesses have been a little slow off the mark in recognising this as a simple fact of life and they’ve spent far too much time harking back to the good old days rather than shaping up their businesses for what’s ahead”