The Crawley-based commercial printer, which primarily finishes work printed on its Xerox iGen4 digital press, is currently producing nearly 100,000 books per month.

According to Geoff Ovenden, work manager at Providence, the Duplo machine has enabled the company to retain a greater profit margin on certain jobs.

He said: "Until the purchase of the iGen 4 digital press, we had been finishing books on a Muller line. With the set-up times and skill required to get the machine going, all the benefit of short-run digital was going out the window.

"I was having to print off 300 copies to get 200 copies finished; taking a lot of the profit out of shorter run jobs."

The company's new Duplo System 5000 bookletmaker can run at up to 5,000 booklets per hour and features tool-less fully automatic set up and change over between jobs.

Previously, Providence had to batch jobs up according to format, and Ovenden said not having to do this has made "a world of difference".

He said: "There are no tools required to set up; my operators find the machine extremely intuitive, it doesn’t take up a lot of room and most importantly jobs are being turned around that much quicker.

"We have a far more versatile machine; as a result we are running a lot more efficiently throughout the plant."