The upgrade, which also includes a Xerox 560, Horizon perfect binder and three-knife trimmer and the latest Fiery DFE for the iGen150s (in place of the standard Creo DFEs on the iGen3s), has boosted quality and productivity at BMC's Guildford facility.
Mark Buckingham, operations director at the firm, said: "The Fiery RIP on the iGens effectively means that PDF files that were taking us 15 minutes to RIP on the iGen3s, we're now doing in something ridiculous like 22 seconds, so in terms of productivity it's absolutely fantastic.
"Depending on the client we could be processing raw data, lots of dynamic imagery, or large PDF files and when you're sending 50,000 dynamic documents to a printer in PDF format, you can imagine you need a fairly large DFE to be able to RIP it."
Pitney Bowes Automated Document Factory (ADF) software was also included in the investment, which Buckingham said "absolutely wipes the floor with any other form of QC you can do from an integrity perspective, because if the pack doesn't hold 100% integrity - it can't go through the system".
"We now can track data literally down to customer - and to [individual] documents within customer packs - all the way through from receipt of data right up to the back door through the ADF.
"So we're barcoding, we're scanning at every station, everything's tracked and then we're allowing our customers to view the management information through online portals, so they can have a real-time view of exactly where their mailing is within the process."
Any mail pieces that are found not to hold 100% integrity at any point during the production cycle are automatically rejected and reprinted on the Xerox 560. "That means we can quickly reprint any spoilage and then we get the whole job closed off through the ADF," said Buckingham.
The invesment follows a spate of recent contract wins, including a £2m two-year deal with credit finance firm Provident Financial awarded last month and two other contracts that have yet to be announced. BMC attributed these to an "increased awareness of the cost efficiency benefits of outsourced multichannel communications services".
BMC managing director Catherine Burke described the spate of wins as a "tipping point", adding that firm was benefiting from its early-mover advantage in developing services across creative, print, data management, scanning, mobile, email and hybrid mail.
"In some of these areas it's fair to say that we developed solutions ahead of time, in anticipation of where we believed the market was heading," she said. "[But] the clear message from our run of recent contract wins is that client demand for fully integrated services has now reached a tipping point."
She added: "I think it's fair to say that over the past three to five years people have been doing a lot of talking about multichannel campaigns but the actual ability to execute them - particularly when you think back to five years ago - many organisations structurally weren't in the right place to make it happen, or didn't have the right data to be able to make those mutichannel campaigns really fly.
"Customers now - in 2014 and arguably in the past year or so - really are getting to grips with mulitchannel and actually do understand how to execute and how to get their data into a position to be able to do multichannel and I think that's were the tipping point is: five years ago everybody was talking about wanting to be able to find multichannel providers and partners but I think if we're really honest about it, people's ability to truly execute compelling multichannel communications has only really started to become prevalent now."
