Formara Print and Marketing is a commercial printing company based in Southend-on-Sea, Essex in the UK. Building a reputation for innovation in print and direct mail solutions over more than 50 years, the 28-strong team serves a wide range of organisations, including the Ministry of Justice, Aldi and Simon & Schuster Publishing. The company chose to upgrade to Quadient’s DS-700 iQ folder inserter from a previous model. The new machine gave Formara enhanced processing speed and improved capacity, processing up to 7,000 envelopes per hour.
Challenge:
In 2020, Formara’s team faced its biggest test yet, as the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the demand for high-volume, personalised mailings. In March 2020, the UK Government approached Formara to be part of the delivery team for the REACT survey. Run by Ipsos and Imperial College London, REACT was a nationwide study designed to track the infection rates and long-term effects of the COVID-19 virus.
The project required testing kits to be distributed to millions across the UK. Formara was tasked with keeping up with the sudden spikes in demand for personalised test kits, as Andy Pond, Managing Director of Formara, explained: “We scaled up very quickly: originally, we were discussing around 20,000 kits a month, but things shifted and eventually we were sending ten times that figure. Ultimately, we sent out 4 million test kits in two years.”
Emerging from this project, Pond and the team knew Formara needed to ensure it was capable of quickly scaling up its operations to meet unexpected spikes in demand.
Formara was also experiencing growing demand for more complex, personalised mailing orders. Pond realised these were growing increasingly time-consuming to complete manually: “Some of our clients serve both England and Wales, which means not every piece of mail we send is the same, as some customers require Welsh language versions of letters, questionnaires and inserts.”
Ultimately, the team realised it needed to review the technology in its mailroom to ensure it could keep pace with the growing need to quickly scale and deliver complex jobs. Formara also wanted to draw on the power of automation to drive operational capacity and ultimately support long-term customer retention and acquisition.
Tools
Formara already had a long-standing relationship with Quadient and discussed its challenges with the mailing and customer communications expert. Following an assessment period, Quadient advised Formara in 2023 to upgrade to its DS-700 iQ folder inserter from a previous model. The new machine gave Formara enhanced processing speed and improved capacity, processing up to 7,000 envelopes per hour.
The DS-700 iQ also introduced fully automated barcode reading, to ensure accurate insert-to-recipient matching. This plays a crucial role in reducing manual intervention and errors for complex jobs, as Pond explained: “Using a semi-automatic or non-barcode system, requires manually checking the mailings, which takes extra time. Time is money and delays increase costs for the customer. As the number of elements contained in a typical piece of mail continues to rise, the DS-700 iQ’s barcode matching ability has been a game-changer.”
To further enhance efficiency and accountability, Formara also integrated Quadient’s Automated Insertion Management System (AIMS), enabling closed-loop reporting, real-time tracking and error reduction. “The AIMS software was evidently superior to the competition, it gave fantastic closed-loop reports meaning every single piece of mail that should have been accounted for was accounted for in the AIMS system,” added Pond.
Results:
Formara is now better positioned to meet the high levels of productivity its customers demand. The implementation of the Quadient DS-700 iQ folder inserter led to a five-fold increase in job completion speed, enabling Formara to handle multiple daily projects efficiently. Pond said: “We’re getting a lot more productivity out of the new system. The volume of mailing we’re producing has increased, the machine is a solid, robust mechanical system and the general downtime is low.”
The DS-700 iQ also enabled Formara to become more confident in its ability to handle increasing order complexity. The barcode tracking functionality ensures perfect insert-to-recipient matching, eliminating errors in both transactional and marketing campaigns. “Rather than completing the mailings separately, the new Quadient machine can just run it all in one go, which is important as intricacies become more relevant to our market,” added Pond.
Integrated real-time tracking also enables Formara’s clients to monitor their campaigns with confidence: “If we know a mailing that’s coming off the end of the machine is accurate because of the barcode system, production time is reduced because the team doesn’t need to run manual checks. This allows us to be more competitive in the marketplace and increases the trust employees and clients have in our products,” Pond said. “Even when jobs contain thousands of pieces of mail, we can say with confidence that we have not made any production errors. Giving customers peace of mind is what Formara is all about.”
Since the project’s completion, Formara has experienced a 25% increase in mailing volume, while maintaining the precision and reliability of mailings. The improved system supports both small and high-volume mailing solutions, so as customers’ diverse needs change, so can Formara. With more repetitive manual tasks being automated, in turn Formara’s team can focus on higher value work and build closer relationships with customers. “Streamlining complex work is key to our ongoing relationship with Quadient. The machine already runs across one and a half to two shifts a week at the moment and as workloads increase, the DS-700 iQ could enable Formara to go much further and one day become a 24/7 business,” said Andy.
In the longer-term, the partnership with Quadient is keeping Formara ahead of industry trends and enabling it to scale operations in line. With a strong foundation in technology and client-first service, Formara has future-proofed its business for long term growth and competitiveness.
