The Bristol-based direct mail printer, which spent £1m on new digital print equipment, servers and web-to-print software in February, has invested in an additional XMPie uProduce server to meet the requirements of a single client.

Kevin Pembroke, sales and marketing director at Latcham Direct, would not reveal the name of the client but said that it was based in the insurance sector and had a requirement for policy documents for prospective clients to be drafted rapidly using rules-based automation.

Each document is around 20 pages on average and contains a mix of text and images (charts, graphs, etc) all of which is fully variable, depending on the data input by the consumer (or call centre operative) generating the quote.

Pembroke said: "We have to deliver back to the client, on-demand the document that we are going to send out, within four minutes of the data coming in to the server. We needed to invest in a dedicated server for this customer to handle that speed and volume of data.

"There are thousands of elements of content and the software processes the data against a bunch of rules to determine which elements are included and then renders all of the images on the fly.

"If it's going to be printed it's then sent to the iGen4s for print and dispatch and at the same time the exact rendering of the document that's going to be printed is uploaded to the archive and made available to view online."

The policy documents are digitally printed and folded and stitched into A5 booklets before mailing to the consumer.