The 52-staff business will take delivery of the new device on 17 March when it will be put straight to work, replacing a 20-year-old guillotine that managing director Paul Gamble said had been reliable, but was due an upgrade. 

“With our increasing volumes and all jobs going through one of our guillotines, the time is now to upgrade our capability.

"We are particularly keen to take advantage of the lifting equipment to improve the environment for staff and the integrated scales so we can have accurate sheet counts on every finishing job we do,” Gamble said. 

As well as the lifting and weighing capability, the guillotine comes with Compucut, a feature designed to cut programming time to almost zero, according to the manufacturer, as well as increasing efficiency. The device also features a touchscreen as well as Optiknife’s quick and safe knife changing.

The £5m-turnover business invested nearly £1m in a B2 Heidelberg Speedmaster XL 75 with coater in 2015, which Gamble said had been partly behind the decision to invest in Polar.

“We’ve had such a good experience with that press - Heidelberg and Polar are leading names in the market and make such good equipment it just made sense to invest this way,” he added. 

Whittington Moor has been trading since 1932 and offers sheetfed litho, digital, reel to sheet NCR printing and high speed inkjet, as well as finishing and mailing services.

The company handles direct mail, commercial print, NCR and stationery across a range of stocks for national commercial organisations, public sector groups, charities and print brokers.