BTP Architects was established in 1947 and is based in Manchester. They offer specialist expertise in a wide variety of building types and are leaders in housing design, building reuse and conservation, across the country.
BTP Architects was established in 1947 and is based in Manchester. They offer specialist expertise in a wide variety of building types and are leaders in housing design, building reuse and conservation, across the country.
The company recognised the need to save all emails as regularly as they would save physical letters. Justin Saunders, Senior Consultant, told us they would spend a lot of time manually naming each email, with a specific naming convention for the subject line, and then filing them into a specific folder designated for each individual product.
He said: “It is immensely time-consuming, and different team members apply different levels of effort to get it done. Once you’ve got all emails filed, the only way you can search for it is by the name and subject line. So not only was it hard to file; it was also hard to find it. We would get junior staff to file months’ worth of emails, which was better than nothing but still not good.”
One of Justin’s tasks was to look for a solution to help with managing emails as they are an important form of communication. He tried out 6 different applications, from free to expensive, and other various options, but nothing really tackled the issue. Justin added: “I expected Microsoft to have a solution, but they don’t. Nothing really did what we wanted, until someone mentioned Mail Manager. When we tried it, it fitted all our criteria. Although we often treat emails as informal, emails are a formal solution that need to be treated as such.”
For a small company with 15 employees, resources are limited so BTP takes efficiency and cost reduction seriously. Mail Manager was the perfect solution to sort all their pain points.
The Mail Manager software has resolved their problems and since Justin sets the user preferences, he can make sure the software prompts users to make sure everyone is properly filing emails. This not only guarantees that emails are being filed, but it also speeds up the process and efficiency of saving information.
Searching for information is now easy and they no longer need to know the name of an email or take hours looking for the information; especially as they often have to refer back to contracts and correspondence from years before. Justin said: “Mail Manager has intuitive and powerful searching features. The social mapping function is one of my favourite features. It also provides big time savings and operational efficiencies when looking for information.”
On the importance of email, he added: “Professional services firms, like architects and lawyers, would benefit from managing their emails properly. Mail Manager does that and that genuinely makes me happy.”
The software was an important asset to BTP Architects and was the only solution that truly solved the needs of the company. He summarises: “There’s now no need for additional overheads to file months of emails, and no information or additional time gets lost. Mail Manager is a great addition to Outlook that provides a superbly efficient method of filing and searching for emails.”
