According to the Ipswich company's managing director Philip Dodd, the company had two guillotine operators for its three guillotines.

He said: "We calculated that it would be more economical to sell one of the guillotines if we could find an efficient way of trimming the books coming off our Horizon BQ470 perfect binder that wouldn’t impact the other guillotining work.

"We don’t use the BQ470 every day, so the HT30 can be wheeled in and wheeled out, as and when it’s needed and that makes much more sense. We tended to have one person running the BQ470 and another feeding book blocks into the guillotine. Now we have the HT30 positioned next to the BQ470 which has eased production. It has removed a bottleneck and improved workflow."

The HT30 includes a touch-screen monitor that can perform changeovers in less than 60 seconds. It can store up to 20 jobs in its memory, and produces up to 500 books per hour.

Healeys has a £3m turnover and employs 40 staff. It specialises in short-run four-colour work and fine art printing.