The Midsomer Norton business had been adapting its offering due to the decline in some of its traditional markets of business forms and pre-print for transactional clients.
“We made the decision to go to the next level, and lockdown has accelerated the process,” explained group sales and marketing director Andrew Law.
Law said that lockdown have given the firm “breathing space” to make the changes: “It’s about finding the opportunities in a situation like this,” he added.
Following the appointment of Chris Walton as head of operations at its transactional wing at the end of 2018, Law said the business had also benefited from fresh thinking about the best way to take the business forward.
Integrity has revamped working patterns, strengthened its IT team with in-house developers, and installed Canon inkjet kit to replace an ageing Xerox toner fleet.
The new brand for the firm’s expanded offering is Integrity Connect.
This encompasses web-to-print services, secure hybrid mail via Clarity Mail, inbound services and document automation, and outbound options including print, email and SMS.
“We are helping our customers connect with end users and partners by whatever channel is appropriate,” Law said.
The first device to be installed was a Canon Varioprint i300 cut sheet inkjet press. This was followed over the summer by a Canon Colorstream 6700 inkjet web press, which allows Integrity Connect to offer a ‘white paper in’ solution of its own.
“We’ve gone from having the capacity to produce 500,000 A4 colour images a month to the ability to produce 50m if we run on triple shift.
“It’s a massive increase in capacity but it’s aligned with market expectations – for transactional work you need spare capacity so you can flex to meet urgent demands. It gives us a more agile, more responsive approach,” he explained.”
The culmination of the circa £1.2m investment over six months will arrive in late October, when a £100,000 Opex Falcon Red high-speed document scanner arrives at the operation for handling inbound documents.
Law said that inbound scanning had become increasingly important to clients as working from home had caused problems for a number of organisations in handling normal post.
“We digitise it and created a virtual postroom for the client, with bank level security. We are automating document workflows for our clients, and making it easy for customers.
“We are also building bespoke systems that drive a lot of business document automation via web-to-print,” Law added.
Integrity also uses Quadient’s specialist software as part of its offering.
“We have gained 8,000 new individual users across our existing and new customer base during lockdown, and have been mailing out up to 50,000 packs a day through Clarity Mail now, which is probably about a 20% uplift on pre-lockdown levels. It’s been really successful.”
Integrity Print’s services also include labels and packaging, as well as integrated label products used in e-commerce. Integrity and sister firm A1 Security Print in Birmingham are part of the Mcaarp Holdings group of companies, which had sales of more than £57m last year.
Over the summer Integrity Print also promoted Martin Clissold, previously general manager of its labels wing, to the new role of customer relations director.
