Fusion Brings Kinko's Closer To FedEx Fold

FedEx Corp.'s acquisition of retail copy-shop chain Kinko's earlier this year is showing results. The courier and logistics company last week unveiled digital document-printing services to be offered via its FedEx Kinko's outlets, as well as plans to tie information about orders into an upcoming platform that will pull together data on clients and their shipments across all FedEx operating companies.

By January, customers and FedEx employees will be able to use new apps, including Customer Fusion, to access a single view of orders in progress, shipment history, pending inquiries, service issues, and account information. Information will be pulled from databases maintained by FedEx Services, FedEx Express, Fed-Ex Ground, and FedEx Freight groups. The project falls under FedEx's Fusion initiative, which began earlier this year with the company pulling together transactional data on package shipments across its businesses.

"FedEx has been one of the leaders pushing the notion of Web self-service," writes Merrill Lynch analyst Jason Maynard in a report on the Fusion project. At FedEx's analyst conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., last week, company officials explained the next piece of that strategy. FedEx later this summer will launch File Print FedEx Kinko's, a service to give customers a virtual printer connection from a PC to any U.S. FedEx Kinko's print center. Kinko's customers previously could create print-ready files from a PC, but the new offering adds capabilities, such as receiving a PDF version of the layout format to approve and sending one file to print at multiple locations.

On the agenda, says Laurie Zeitlin, senior VP and CIO at FedEx Kinko's, are plans to tie orders placed via this service to the Fusion platform, which will complete the customer view of past and real-time transactions.