Guildprime had suffered a couple of incidents with long-term clients not paying money they owed upon the completion of projects. The company’s existing systems made it difficult to track their communications with clients, efficiently file and store messages and find the information they needed to appease any disputes.
As Paul White, IT Manager and Setter-Out at Guildprime, says: “It was very difficult to try and trace emails as we didn't have backups of our individual mailbox's, which meant going through individual inboxes to try to find emails from over eight years ago. It was a nigh-on impossible task.” A good example of this issue was a client in Nicosia, in Cyprus. As Paul explains: “Their legal system won’t even look at an issue for five years, and it ended up taking about nine or ten years for our MD to get the money out of them. That was one of the key reasons that made us look for a service that would help us with future-proofing the business from the legal side of things. We realised that you need to have a paper trail just in case you don’t get paid.”
Guildprime knew they needed to find a solution to this problem, but struggled to find one that was appropriate and affordable. As Paul says: “We needed to find a tool that would store and file emails, archive them and arrange them so you could find them easily for multiple uses. I was hunting for something for over a year and couldn’t find anything that would save us the time and hassle and was near the budget we wanted to spend.”
One alternative considered was Sharepoint but, as Paul explains, it wasn’t a suitable option for the business. “I looked at the Sharepoint route but it was too involved,” he said. “The expenditure and training would almost create the need for a new person in a new role, and the total cost of ownership would have been ridiculous.”
