The Wellingborough, Northants-based group, which was founded in 1770, is a key supplier to the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) and amongst its services offers race card production and a raft of other printing and publishing services to the horse racing industry.

To streamline its production processes the family-owned business has invested in the cloud-based Papermule production workflow system. The suite, which is due to go live in November, will cost under £100,000 over three years.

In the past 12 months Weatherbys’ print arm has produced race cards for 1,484 race meetings in the UK and Ireland including the Grand National and Royal Ascot.

“The Papermule system is a digital asset management and workflow tool that helps automation processes and provides a web portal for customers to upload artwork and link to our pre-flight system,” said Weatherbys head of printing services Steve Arnold.

“It makes sure artwork is correct, checks things like the size of pdfs and offers feedback. We want to create extra capacity; we want more staff not less.”

He added: “We are a bit unusual in being both publisher and inplant printer that also offers design services. A lot of people are one or the other but the Papermule system ticks all those boxes.”

The 25-staff print operation runs two sheetfed litho Sakurai presses, two Xerox digital colour machines and two mono digital presses.

Papermule managing director Mike Hoy said: “We have been working closely with Weatherbys to deploy a system that would aid in the everyday production of products like the race cards.

“But we also want to provide a means of giving Weatherbys customers better access to the many services that are on offer.”

Last month the business installed a Ricoh L4160 wide-format printer to produce posters and equestrian score cards.