Expecting an Autumn election, the firm took delivery of the new engine in late May, to give the team time to get to grips with the machine and warm up for a busy period.

“But obviously, the election [was called] pretty much the week after we installed it,” said Whittington Moor managing director Paul Gamble.

He told Printweek: “The guys had literally three days’ training, and then we were straight onto 24/5.”

In normal periods, about a third of Whittington Moor’s work is for direct mail – during the election, the firm accelerated massively.

Previously, the company would typically print mail through its Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75, with overprint done on one of the firm’s three Xerox Versants. During the election period, it went from printing 1,500 SRA3 sheets an hour on the Xerox machines to 4,200 with the iX and two Xerox devices; the Speedmaster has now been taken down to two shifts, rather than three.

“We’d been looking at inkjet for a few years,” added Gamble.

“We started looking before Covid, but obviously that stalled us. But, looking around about 18 months ago, we knew there weren’t many other alternatives in SRA3 [to the iX].

“Canon were able to take us to existing customers who had been running it in production for a reasonable period of time, and we were really impressed.”

To fit the new press, Whittington Moor had a new dedicated clean room with air conditioning built at its 1,860sqm site for the new machine, taking three months.

Now, after the rush of the election, the new machine has given Whittington Moor significant breathing room to expand across both direct mail and commercial print work, Gamble said.

“It gives us 50% more variable data printing capacity than we’ve ever had, and it gives us capacity in that short- and medium-run books, wirebounds, and perfect-bound books, which we do in house: we’ll be much more competitive in those short and medium runs.”

Whittington Moor employs 54, turning over around £6m annually.