AB Heritage is a professional heritage consultancy firm, offering archaeological services and advice for planning and development works across the UK. The firm's expert heritage consultants guide works with heritage reports and archaeological assessments that meet clients' planning requirements, assessing risks and providing effective solutions.
When Andy Buckley, Managing Director and owner of AB Heritage, began employing people into his firm in 2011, email quickly became an obvious issue. Andy explained, "We have a lot of projects where people work independently, but also many where they work collaboratively. When someone was on annual leave, or they were away from the office on-site, for example, it became an issue where colleagues would have to drill into the files they were working on and try to establish what was happening. We knew we needed a system quite quickly."
As Managing Director, Andy was also quite concerned with the time it would take his team to manually file emails. He continued, "We predominantly work in a consultancy capacity, so our communications are almost exclusively via email. People also contact us all the time by email with requests, bids, and cost proposals; however, our filing system was struggling to keep pace.
Saving an email was done manually, with the email given a name that would make it searchable later. It knocked out too much of our technical time, and productivity and profit suffered as a result. It became apparent that we really needed to get that sorted to create a more fluid system with our heritage consultants and the tech stack all working together."
Prior to implementing Mail Manager, AB Heritage were considering different tools within the Microsoft365 suite; however, they found that the actual file saving and email recall storage wasn't as strong as they would have liked. They needed a tool that would achieve their email filing and search aims, but within a certain price bracket.
Andy first came across Mail Manager when AB Heritage was working in a subcontractor role to a large development and infrastructure company. The client's team were using Mail Manager in their operations and Andy was impressed with how the software worked. Andy commented, "I just thought the system was so robust, and I saw I could quickly save, identify folders, search and also have an ability to stop certain teams going into non-relevant folders; it just seemed like a natural fit for AB Heritage."
When asked to compare AB Heritage before and after Mail Manager, Andy explained, "From a business perspective, every single person we've had work for us has commented how good Mail Manager is. It's totally improved the speed we can work at, the ability to give more accurate answers to clients, and we can easily identify coms that have happened when a member of the team is away from the office. It's a fantastic system."
"I think the main benefit is having the ability to scan through various folders or files and quickly see what has happened. We have saved hours per week moving away from a totally manual system to basically being able to click a button now and have the answers we need at our fingertips. Plus, our communications are always in the right folder and can be recalled by any team member quickly - from a business perspective, you can't get better than that. The fact that you can file into multiple folders at once and can choose to save with or without attachments are both incredibly helpful for us too."
An added benefit of Mail Manager is that the firm have a strong archive system in place for all email correspondence. This has particularly come in handy when it comes to AB Heritage's professional accreditation with the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists (CIfA). For their last two Registered Archaeological Organisation panel reviews, AB Heritage was able to better demonstrate their robust digital resource and archival management of emails through the Mail Manager product.
Andy commented, "Mail Manager creates an easily accessed archive system. For us, it fulfils some of the data storage and archiving standards set out by CIfA, which helps ensure the accurate storage and retrieval of relevant data. While most of the information saved is day-to-day comms, it also includes project-specific information, consultation comments, and discussions with various stakeholders. Mail Manager can also be organised to allow attachments to be saved or removed, and we can also file multiple emails at once or in multiple locations. It really expedites how we work but allows a strong archival and retrieval system, which we never had before."
While speaking to Andy, a final unexpected benefit of Mail Manager came up. AB Heritage are contacted by people looking for the rebuild cost of Listed Buildings for insurance purposes. Andy explained, "While this request for information is limited, it does happen several times each year. In the past, every time we responded to these emails, we were essentially starting afresh each time, because it wasn't worthwhile creating a template for it in Outlook, given the limited contact we had about these works. Now, I can go into Mail Manager, type in the search query boxes 'insurance' or 'listed building rebuild' and it will show me previous emails. I can open these, change a few simple details, and that's an hour saved for the same of a ten-second search. It's excellent."
Andy has been asked over the years what AB Heritage does to manage emails and project information. His advice simple, that anyone looking starts their search at Mail Manager, explaining, "It's a great tool and I can highly recommend that anyone looking to improve their email system considers Mail Manager. It's an easy to use, highly efficient way to improve your resource management end to end through the simple facility of email saving and search."
