The Delt operation is a joint enterprise owned by Plymouth City Council and the Devon Clinical Commissioning Group which supports public sector organisations across the South West with BPO offering that covers HR, IT, Payroll and pensions, print and procurement.

The Plymouth-headquartered business’s Print and Mail unit had been focused on small-format printing, largely transactional and hybrid mail printing for local authorities, but was also outsourcing around £70,000 and £100,000 of wide-format work.

As a result, last year the operation made the decision to bring wide-format in-house and installed an HP L560 Latex printer, Graphtec FC9000-160 cutter and Easymount 1600SH laminator over the summer, all from CMYUK.

“We looked at what we were buying and realised that we could produce this quite easily if we brought the equipment in-house,” says Aaron Hartley, Print and Mail manager.

The operation believes the £32,000 spend on the new equipment will result in cost savings of around £170,000 across the next five years. The spend will also support the Print and Mail arms ambition to expand its operations from supporting public sector bodies, charities and not-for-profits into the B2B arena.

“This new investment will open up our customer base dramatically, allowing us to work with customers that in the past would have been unobtainable. Alongside this, we can now up-sell our other services,” said Hartley.

“It is going to open up new markets to us, and we'll just explore them as we go.”

While many of the large-scale public events that the Print and Mail unit was planning to support with its wide-format spend were cancelled due to Covid-19 restrictions, Hartley said the kit had been kept busy producing safeguarding signage.