Ardent Consulting Engineers

Ardent Consulting Engineers (Ardent) are a multi-disciplinary civil engineering consultancy, who work closely with clients to deliver innovative and cost-effective solutions. They work across a number of sectors including residential/commercial development, local authority and oil/chemical storage.

Ardent currently employs 74 staff with varied skills and experience. The expertise of their staff enables them to offer a wide range of transport and infrastructure services so they are always able to see the bigger picture and consider implications outside their specialist areas of expertise.

Ardent helps their clients realise their development aspirations, by providing a friendly, focused and professional service and by building close working relationships with their clients, and consultants in other disciplines.

The teams at Ardent would typically have several team members working together on the same project at the same time. Emails were left sitting in individuals in-boxes and couldn’t be accessed by the wider project team. This became even more of an issue when the team member was off sick, on leave or had left the company. The information in the email was crucial to the projects and was constantly needed by the other team members, to enable them to see who had been spoken to, what had been agreed and able to complete their tasks.

Steve Burton, Associate Director at Ardent, had used Mail Manager at his previous company Buchannan's, so knew how it could solve the problems Ardent were encountering and so was the obvious choice to them to look at.

Mail Manager is an Outlook add-in developed by Arup and has been rolled out across the whole company. The teams found it easy to implement and simple to use straight away. As the number of teams at Ardent continue to grow, each new employee starts with Mail Manager on their PC and as part of their induction is shown how the internal filing system works. They are up and running quickly, consistently filing their emails into one central location with minimal effort and complying with QA requirements.

The extremely powerful search tool, allows individual member of the teams to search every single filed email no matter who sent or received it, sometimes going back over several years. Vital project information can be quickly found for getting fast responses to compliance and client requests.