Howard Hunt has recently secured a number of new contracts, which has brought its monthly output of door drop pieces to 35m and personalised mailers to 24m.

The inserter, which outputs 26,000 filled envelopes an hour, will replace two older CMC Machinery systems: a CMC400 and CMC250.

The CMC9000 joins a fleet of three similar machines, the most recent of which was combined with a CMC JWR to create a bespoke Combymail system, enabling Howard Hunt to break into the paper wrapping market.

The surge in finishing investments over the past year has been accompanied by a £3.5m upgrade programme in its digital division.

The firm recently took delivery of its second Xerox iGen4 and installed eight Kodak Versamark DH9100 printheads on an offline finishing system at the end of 2012.

It is also trialling Kodak’s Prosper 5000XLi, an upgrade of the original configuration that Howard Hunt had been beta testing since 2011.

Howard Hunt joint managing director Lucy Edwards said: "The CMC9000s help us to continually improve speed to market for our clients, provide closed loops of integrity and improve efficiency whilst reduce environmental impact from minimised waste."