Kevin Hicks is the Vice President of IT and one of the owners of M. J. Harris. He has focused on finding solutions to save time and increase productivity ever since he joined the company.
Kevin Hicks is the Vice President of IT and one of the owners of M. J. Harris. He has focused on finding solutions to save time and increase productivity ever since he joined the company.
For Kevin, the biggest challenge for the company was a lack of information, particularly relating to emails. They were not being filed properly and colleagues were wasting time with email filing. M. J. Harris has always filed emails onto the network, which was overly time consuming.
The need to sort this challenge led them to hire a developer to create a tool to file emails. Kevin says: “Many times we were trying to find emails and they couldn’t be found, so we decided to create a tool to file emails but realised at an early stage that our abilities and skillset for doing that in-house made it too complicated. We had just one attempt and it really didn’t work, leading us to give up on the idea.”
Sticking with the old process was creating a lot of unproductive time when they saved emails, so Kevin began to look for a solution that would resolve their issue. The initial process was to save messages out of Outlook in the job folders, and it was necessary to look in these folders to find information. He elaborates: “A cloud-based software wasn’t very appealing to anyone in the organization. Just because you’ve got a policy, doesn’t mean everyone will follow it. There was always a question if that information was actually filed, so we kept having issues.”
For M. J. Harris, Mail Manager was an easy sell because the software encourages filing and learns your behaviours and preferences to file, speeding up the process of filing emails.
Kevin says: “When I came across Mail Manager I thought ‘Aha there’s a tool that does what we need.’ Before, we were manually to saving messages in a certain format, and Mail Manager gave us the capability to store that information in the same format in a more user friendly way. We pushed Mail Manager out into installation and people got used to the difference really quickly, especially those with the largest email inboxes.”
Since the beginning, they have experienced an improvement with productivity and information being saved. Kevin adds: “It’s proved itself to be a worthwhile solution that people use daily to do their job more productively and efficiently.”
M. J. Harris has been using Mail Manager for more than 5 years and recently added another solution, Mimecast, to double up on security. Kevin explains: “We got Mimecast not to replace Mail Manager, but to work alongside it offering us extra spam and web protection and adding another backup. It has been a great tool. Mail Manager archives the emails and Mimecast is the second layer, so every email sent in or out of the company is copied, regardless if it was job related or filed via Mail Manager. Mimecast is our failsafe, in case someone accidentally forgets to save via Mail Manager, we can rest assured that there is a copy saved in the cloud.”
For them, Mail Manager is the only software that offers what they need; it simplifies a manual process and allows to search for emails in an intuitive way, allowing them to quickly find key information. Mail Manager allows M. J. Harris to maintain their current way of doing business and archiving their project related emails and increase business efficiency all at the same time.
