The £100m-turnover retail marketing specialist has invested some £1.5m in the project, which has been masterminded by chief information officer Chris Airey.

"We had a diverse range of around 20 systems that had been built for various clients, or became part of our offering through acquisitions. We had three or four different infrastructure providers and quite a few legacy contracts," Airey explained.

"Because of the multiple brands within the group, our IT capability hasn’t always been apparent. With Connect, we are putting all of that in one place where it’s easily accessible."

Bezier selected £43m-turnover Star, based in Theale, as its infrastructure partner because of Star’s flexible approach to the project. "They are a good partner and we were keen to deliver this using a modern, hosted infrastructure," Airey added.

Bezier Connect is being deployed as a number of modules, with customers able to tap into those that best suit their requirements. The modules include digital asset management, campaign management, a POS module that includes store profiling, and a procurement facility for items not produced or supplied by Bezier.

Airey described the user interface as "intuitive and modern", so that minimal customer training is required. "It can take days out of the campaign cycle through simple initiation briefing," he added. "We think the campaign module will be quite transformational for clients."

Amalgamating its IT systems has also enabled Bezier to reduce its spend on local IT support, saving circa £500,000. It has also added gigabit links between its three main sites to facilitate rapid data delivery – Star claimed its cloud-based communications and networking know-how meant files of up to 60GB could be delivered "in seconds".

Customers began using the system last month, and Bezier is planning a multi-phase roll-out based on the way clients use the group’s services. It’s also possible for customers who don’t actually print with the business to have an IT-only contract to allow them to tap into the system.

Further modules are planned for autumn