Worcester, UK - Stanford Marsh, a leading independent solutions provider for the wide-format and 3D print sectors – and one of only three UK vendors permitted to supply and service HP’s new PageWide XL Series of products – has installed five new HP PageWide XL 8000 printers at the United Kingdom Hydrographic Office’s (UKHO) headquarters in Taunton, Somerset.

In Europe’s largest HP PageWide installation to date, the UKHO’s five HP PageWide XL 8000 printers form an integral part of an end-to-end solution developed by UKHO in partnership with HP and folding system manufacturer MBO. The new solution is being used to transform UKHO’s chart printing operations.

The UKHO produces nautical charts, publications and services for the Royal Navy and merchant shipping to protect lives at sea. In August 2014, the UKHO started its transformation project to move the lithographic printing of its charts across to digital print. The estimated output volume of the new digital printing system is circa 4 million square metres per annum.

The supply of the HP PageWide XL printers used within the project went out for tender to HP’s UK resellers and was won by Stanford Marsh. Paul Kelly, Production Manager at UKHO*, explains: “We made the decision to go with Stanford Marsh as they could supply the printers at a cost-effective price, and – crucially – they were able to meet the Service Level Agreement (SLA) criteria that we outlined.

“The SLAs we put in place are robust and equate to 92% productivity between 6am and 9pm, five days a week. We require on-site support within four hours of an incident being logged, the problem has to be resolved within six hours, and if it isn’t, a new HP PageWide printer needs to be installed into the workflow and operating successfully within twelve hours. Stanford Marsh was able to offer all of this at a competitive price.”

The end-to-end solution went live in August 2015. Since that time, UKHO has transformed the printing of its 3500 unique charts to a fully digital process and is reaping the benefits of faster production speeds, improved efficiency, reduced wastage, lower stockholding requirements, better environmental credentials, and much more.  

Additionally, moving to an inline solution – rather than a stock-based printing model – has enabled UKHO to make production time savings.