The machine was delivered to the facility, Unison's second largest, in January, replacing an outgoing 11-year-old Duplo System 5000. It was supplied by Intelligent Finishing Systems (IFS).

“The IFS salesman had been trying to sell one to me for 25 years and he couldn’t believe his luck this time,” said the facility's print room manager Richard Walton. 

“It was such a smooth transition. We took the other one in a part exchange and within 24 hours the engineers came in, the old one went out, and the new one was set up and ready to be trained on.

The StitchLiner 5500 has a list price of £125,000. 

“This one is well built with a three-knife trimmer on the end that is a lot more substantial and it has waste extraction, which saves time. It will run twice as fast as the one before but if we do run it twice as fast we actually can’t keep up with it. It has worked wonders in terms of production.”

The StitchLiner, which can hit top speeds of 5,500bph, is mainly being used on jobs of eight-, 12- and 16-page newsletters, along with bespoke materials for any of the 1,000 Unison branches in 12 regions across the UK. 

Along with the three-knife trimmer, it has an ACF-30 Accumulator for scoring and plow-folding, and an icon-based colour touchscreen for setup times of less than two minutes.

The two-staff facility also runs a six-year old Ryobi 525 GX press, along with a raft of finishing equipment that includes folding and guillotining equipment.

Unison has two other smaller local print facilities along with a national London-based print facility for stock materials.