The Essex company's print manager Dean Robinson insisted the new Horizon StitchLiner was “paying for itself from day one” thanks to the streamlined operation and improved productivity.

“There a couple of jobs alone that will cover the cost of the investment over the year,” he said of the equipment, for which his company paid £120,000, and was supplied by IFS.

Maypole Press produces general commercial print and publishes and prints full-colour, glossy, local community magazines including the South Woodham Focus and Danbury Journal.

Robinson's 10-staff operation in Chelmsford runs a four-colour Ryobi 784E, a Konica Minolta bizhub and a Roland DG wide-format press.

“It was not return on investment that prompted the decision to invest. We had an older Duplo system and it was time to upgrade.

“Our existing bookletmaker was getting more and more stretched by the work we were putting through,” he explained.

“We needed a machine that would be a little bit more robust and faster as deadlines in this day and age are getting tighter.

“We saw the StitchLiner in operation at Print Efficiently (6-8 and 20-22 October) then went to see it at an IFS customer. We liked the robust build that you can adjust the thickness of the book to give a nice tight fold.

“The good quality collators aid production and workflow, the trimmer gives a neater edge and the whole system is easy to set up and run.

“I even set it up the other day following prompts on the touchscreen. There is no downtime and we no longer have any bottlenecks. It is a necessity, we could not do without it.

“We have one weekly job of about 8,000 A4 magazines averaging 32pp each and we completed it in half the time.

“Many of our jobs are short runs. We can interrupt longer runs on the StitchLiner but because it finishes the work so quickly we don’t need to do that very often.”

The fully-automated 11,000bph Horizon StitchLiner included an icon-based colour touchscreen for set-ups in less than two minutes, according to Horizon.

A key to its popularity was its ability to work from flat four-page section, eliminating the need for separate bindery stages to be undertaken, added the manufacturer.

It said an integral three-knife trimming station meant there was no need to pre-fold into signatures or pre-trim top and tail, resulting in time, waste and energy savings.