GVK-Siya Zama Construction

GVK–Siya Zama (GVK) is a Construction company based in Cape Town, South Africa, having started in 1960. Whether breaking ground on new projects, upgrading existing structures or revitalising old ones, GVK is constantly building on its reputation of integrity, innovation and expertise.

GVK has helped transform South Africa from the ground up with the construction of notable projects in a range of sectors. Their work helps Improve, update and repurpose infrastructure to add value and enable positive change, as well as gives historic and listed buildings a new lease on life through the implementation of specialised skills.

Nasser Gamieldien, Commercial Director at GVK, told us the issues he faced with the high influx of emails he gets regarding projects, legal matters, subcontractors and more, with a daily average of 300 emails, all while attending to meetings every day. With restricted time, filing emails was an almost impossible mission, with only evenings and weekends being allocated to manage that.

Additionally, another issue was the organisation of information as they had many different folders on Outlook and had to drag and drop to the correct place, which is a slow process either to file or access information. Nasser said: “At some point, I had about 3,000 emails in my inbox. That led me to be the guinea pig for implementing Mail Manager at GVK, and it allowed me to quickly sort out all those emails. Now I have 200 emails, and I’m sure that with Mail Manager within a couple of hours this will be sorted.”

Jody Selipsky, IT Manager at GVK, is responsible for identifying technologies that enable the business and its employees to be more productive. Jody said: ‘Filing, searching and sharing information is a fundamental part of a construction project and email is one of the core information tools used. We required an effective solution to make email more productive for team members on a project by enabling them to share and search for information in a central location.”

For each project, GVK would have between 20 to 50 subfolders, creating more difficulty for either filing or finding an email, especially when it had to be done via their mobile. Another problem was when an employee left the company, IT had to log in to their computer and look for the emails, many of which were not filed, which proved difficult if they ever needed to prove something was written to avoid payment issues or conflicts.

Nasser said: “With Mail Manager, I can do 3 times the amount of filing. Where I used to spend more than an hour filing 100 emails, I can now file 300 in under an hour, so a third of the time. That makes me more productive and I personally don’t get frustrated anymore with this task. It’s easier to track information when an employee leaves the company as well, so there’s no need to log in to their computers.”

Jody added: “Mail Manager was chosen as the best solution due to its speed of filing and searching, ease of use and stability.”

For Nasser, the Mail Manager feature to add and edit comments when you file is important, so then you can also filter by comments or your own set of rules. At the same time, as you can search thousands of emails in seconds, without slowing the server, finding important information has become a flawless process.

With Construction being a never sleeping industry, Nasser said: “Where time is money, being able to save time with Mail Manager is key. I went from working 7 days a week, to claiming back my weekends and being more productive. This started when my CEO saw I had over 2,000 emails and got worried I would burn out. So, we found Mail Manager, and it has truly changed my life. I actually enjoy my job now and can be more flexible and save time, as well as find emails during a meeting and avoid having another meeting in the future.”

Jody said: “From an IT point of view, Mail Manager integrates seamlessly with our SharePoint online infrastructure, which simplifies the management of storing, backing up and securing email.”

To summarise, they see Mail Manager as a user-friendly time-saving product, that should help companies to improve performance. And even for those who avoid change, GVK was able to quickly implement the software and promote the benefits across the business.