Xerox Global Document Outsourcing signed a new six-year contract to deliver all of the UK retail giant's in-store marketing material, including shopper magazines, last month.

Confidentiality agreements prevented Xerox from revealing the value of the contract; however, Andy Jones, director and general manager Xerox GDO Europe, described it as "very significant".

"It's a six-year agreement to supply all of the in-store marketing materials for all of their stores across the UK so it's a very significant value contract," he said.

Xerox has historically focused more on the facilities management end of the print BPO market, through its Enterprise Print Services offering, rather than the outsourced marketing communications sector that is the main focus of most UK print managers.

"We are well-known for our Enterprise Print Services activity, which isn't surprising because it's the logical extension of where the Xerox office equipment has been for many decades," said Jones.

"What we're trying to do is bring the discipline of lean service delivery we have from that BPO sector into the marketing space to provide a quality-assured, industrial strength service delivery platform."

To that end Xerox has made a "significant investment" to set up a cloud-based platform combining various third-party tools, including marketing resource and digital asset management systems, pre-flighting, creative services and enterprise resource planning.

"The other key component is a reverse auction platform, which is technology that Xerox purchased a number of years ago, which is how we manage our [print] suppliers," said Jones.

"We're finding good traction for this multi-channel offering across a number of industries, including retail, financial services, insurance, telecommunications and utilities."