Item: Quadient Inspire
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Quadient Inspire to create mail merges of various degrees of complexity and formats for numerous services, advertising and marketing campaigns. This may include transactional processes such as invoices, statements, demands etc. It has enabled us to broaden the scope of what we do, from using client supplied databases to capturing information directly from pre-printed PDFs. The flexibility of this tool enables us to meet most of the demands of our customers in ways that would have been much more problematic in the past.

Pros and Cons

I am impressed with the way that documents can be inserted as images or natively to create the greatest flexibility of production from final file sizes and formats to amending content via personalisation with the minimum of difficulty.
The intuitive drag and drop facility in the workflows makes even complex processes easy to work with despite potentially appearing daunting at first sight.
Modules are capable of great adaptability and precision from inserting crop marks, imposing multiple copies onto single sheets, capturing data from input documents etc that make otherwise serious problems practical to solve.
Scripting gives almost limitless power to manipulate data and documents to fulfil the requirements of our customers across a wide breadth of possibilities.
There is an excellent and responsive community on hand to provide expert advice when we are challenged by either the application itself or what we need to achieve using it.

Scripting is quite daunting to the uninitiated and more help would be appreciated.
Transactional mail is quite complex to put together but that is to be expected from its very nature. Although we did receive some additional basic training on this, it still remains a little unclear.
Some of the error messages received during processing could be more specific so that the user can diagnose more effectively the issue at hand.

Most Important Features

Broad range of options to meet our clients' requirements.
Power, speed and efficiency of processing.
Intuitive workflow design to aid users.

Return on Investment

The speed with which workflows can be created and amended increases the productivity of our department in comparison with older and less effective solutions.
Processing is also much quicker than we were accustomed to with our previous software package. Clearly this is advantageous for what we can offer to our clients and has enabled us to offer much more than previously; including recently our largest ever campaign which would have been much more daunting in the past.
Although such a tool comes with a significant cost, the power it provides soon makes it a worthy investment due to the increased scope of options and the reduction in preparation and processing schedules.

Alternatives Considered

Previously we used Objectif Lune's PlanetPress suite. A few years ago, when I first became aware of it, this appeared to revolutionise the possibilities when compared to what went before. But now there has been a similar quantum leap thanks to Quadient Inspire. The intuitive methodology of the workflow, precision of the options within the modules, processing power and speed, plus the excellent degree of support offered in the University makes this a vast improvement and has enabled us to offer much more to our clients than would have been possible before.

Key Insights

Do you think Quadient Inspire delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Quadient Inspire's feature set?

Yes

Did Quadient Inspire live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Quadient Inspire go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Quadient Inspire again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Microsoft 365, Adobe Acrobat, FileZilla

Likelihood to Recommend

Inspire Designer is supremely well adapted to preparing new workflows from scratch for basic mail merging solutions. In some cases, the final output can be created in just a few minutes. But if the requirement is more complex such as using variable document artwork or conditional data it can be used in an effective straightforward way. It is well suited to so much of what our customers ask of us, even if they want things that at first seem unusual. For repeat work, templates can be set up that speed processing up immeasurably when compared with previous methods.

Support Rating

Answers always seem to be prompt and helpful with a level of detail befitting the experience of the respective user making the enquiry. This can even involve someone creating a workflow to not only solve the problem but also help the questioner perhaps understand some of the principles involved.

Quadient Inspire Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Not Sure

Bug Resolution

Exceptional Examples of Quadient Inspire Support

We had a really complex job which involved data of variable sources and sizes resulting in output of numerous different formats. In particular, we were struggling with being able to label some of these reports with counts of pages for the different subsets. But the forums were particularly helpful and enabled to solve the problem quite quickly and also enable us to store this solution for use in future is something similar is presented to us.

Usability

Inspire has enormous scope for creating output of numerous different formats and scales. As such, it is necessarily quite a complex tool. But taking these aspects into account I think it has been created in a logical and straightforward way that has minimised some of the problems that this could have brought about. Overall, it is much more powerful and intuitive than other options I've used in the past.

Usability Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar	None

Easy Tasks

The system of modules within the workflow space is excellent and easy to follow.
Being able to select and import artwork using conditions or variables has been especially helpful.
I quite like the options available for naming output files using simple variable options.

Difficult Tasks

I'm still in the early stages of learning how to use scripting.
Sometimes I wonder if the long chains of links in the design layout could be streamlined when it comes to text styles, fonts etc.

Revolution in power and options for our clients

Overall Satisfaction with Quadient Inspire