Five HP PageWide XL printers for UKHO

Print Solutions

Stanford Marsh 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 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, it 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 around four million square metres per annum.

The supply of the HP PageWide XL printers used within the project went out for tender to UK resellers and was won by Stanford Marsh. Paul Kelly, Production Manager at UKHO, explained: ‘We made the decision to go with Stanford Marsh as it 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 6 am and 9 pm, 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 12 hours. Stanford Marsh was able to offer all of this at a competitive price.’