IKM Consulting

IKM Consulting is a multi-disciplinary consultancy with a proud legacy of innovation in Scotland. Having been around for more than 22 years, they offer an integrated value-added portfolio of services that has provided them with the opportunity to work with some of the biggest industrial and commercial clients across the UK.

IKM’s core values embody the culture they want to represent not only in how they interact with each other but with their clients and the surrounding community. They take pride in fostering long-term staff and customer relationships.

Paddi Rooney is an IT Manager at IKM, responsible for all the IT infrastructure within the company. Gordon Nelson is an Engineering Associate at IKM, in charge of managing projects, line management duties, profitability and delivering projects within budgets. Paddi is responsible for the ongoing support of their email management solution, Mail Manager, while Gordon is a day-to-day end-user.

IKM had a need to manage the vast amount of incoming and outgoing emails. Paddi details the initial problem: “Although Mail Manager was implemented before I joined IKM, the problem was the emails coming in and out that were getting lost in the ether. It was becoming difficult for the business to handle the amount of emails we received and sent.

Additionally, colleagues didn’t have access to each other’s mailboxes, so a lot of the problems at the time were with email access. Mail Manager helped rationalise and structure the way email was managed.”

Gordon adds: “Mail Manager also added consistency. It provides us with one single convention, with people doing email management conventionally. Before, we had no consistent way of filing emails - which was inefficient.”

The decision to purchase Mail Manager came from the IKM Board of Directors, who then created a brief induction on how to file emails. This quickly resulted in complete buy-in from the rest of the company.

Mail Manager has transformed the way IKM manages email. From an end-user perspective, Gordon says: “The key functions that my team and I personally use is the filing of project emails (both incoming and outgoing) and the powerful search. The search function is probably the main string to Mail Manager, but the filing is the key to ensure the emails are there to search in the first place. I’ve had incidents in the past where I’ve had to find historical information on a project and found it very useful for that. It’s always been very fast, which is totally different to the time-consuming method of searching through the slow Office folder format. Additionally, we use Mail Manager to make sure we file our emails in accordance with our quality management system. If a decision has been made by email, we have that on file and someone can pick it up.”

From an IT point of view, Paddi adds: “Everyone has to use Mail Manager in a set way. The tool has become an integral part because of the policies we’ve chosen as part of our ISO accreditation. Mail Manager also helps with data retention as well as we have a known structure and data paths. Because the filing is intuitively prompted, our staff don’t have to physically remember to file emails, removing the risks of human error. At IKM, Mail Manager is part of our ISO internal policies we have to adhere to. It certainly helps us achieve that more efficiently.”

To other companies who may be considering an email management tool, Gordon says: “If you are looking for something to easily file and search emails on any project, by anyone, then Mail Manager is a tool you should consider. It’s incredibly easy to use.” Paddi adds: “It’s also really easy to configure. The simple management of it makes it really easy to get started.”

Summarising, Paddi says: “Without Mail Manager, it would put a significant time constraint on people to file and search emails, and it will run the risk of human error. It would increase our workload and introduce another layer of error. Plus, Mail Manager is so ingrained in what we do, our employees would be up in arms without it.”

“It provides us with one single convention, with people doing email management conventionally. Before, we had no consistent way of filing emails - which was inefficient.”

Gordon Nelson, Engineering Associate