RPA Group

RPA Group is a leading medium-sized RICS accredited firm of Quantity Surveyors and Project Managers. Operating from offices in Cardiff, Bristol, and London, RPA services Wales, the South West and London, across a number of sectors. They offer a range of professional, multi-disciplinary services that can be tailored to suit individual needs, including Quantity Surveying, Construction Cost Management, and Project Management, as well as consultancy services in areas such as BIM, Strategic Procurement and CDM Principal Designer Services.

RPA currently employs around 20 members of staff who are qualified in a range of construction industry disciplines and are members of their relevant professional institution. As a company, they pride themselves on achieving continuous improvement within and remaining at the forefront of innovation.

RPA were previously using Microsoft Office, saving emails in folders on their server. However, nobody in the company was actually doing this and filing emails was inconsistent at best. Commercially sensitive email information and correspondence were left locked in individual inboxes, rather than in shared folders, so nobody else could access it. Additionally, RPA were continually having issues with escalating email storage, so they needed a better way to reduce the cost of storing emails.

Leanne Coombes, Office Manager at RPA, is responsible for how the business operates, including its IT, events, stationary and logistics. As a company full of project managers and quantity surveyors, who often work on-site, RPA are often costing and quoting for projects and looking for critical project information, so their IT set-up is a very important part of the company.

Leanne formed part of a three-person team tasked with finding a solution that would solve their email management issues. They needed a solution that would not only make information accessible across the company and reduce the amount of email storage they were using, but also one that would comply with their project management processes and ISO standards.

To solve their email headache, RPA was recommended Mail Manager by Arup. They trialled Mail Manager and quickly decided to implement the Outlook add-in across their business, as both a matter of necessity and the solution meeting their requirements. Their set-up is now Outlook with project folders, with each project having a specific folder, and Mail Manager ensures all emails are being filed in a central location.

RPA were able to start using Mail Manager within two months across the entire company. Following the easy implementation, they were able to search for historical information relating to any topic, even if they simply needed to just find a contact’s phone number in an email signature.

The entire company was involved in a short training period and adoption was quick and simple. They have been using Mail Manager for four years, and it’s fully-integrated in part of their daily processes, included as part of the induction process for new starters. New employees are shown how the email filing and search works, along with educating them on the importance of email management. All employees in RPA are up and running filing their emails consistency, with very little effort and complying with project management process and ISO standards. They can now find proposals quickly and information previously locked in emails is accessible to all.

Leanne says, “Since using Mail Manager, we’ve never struggled to find anything. The powerful search functionality is so easy, especially with the filters that enable us to search for anything. Anyone in the company can now find every single email filed, regardless of who sent it, who received it and what it contained. That means we can find proposal information, tender documents and project conversations at ease. We’ve also managed to reduce our storage costs, which we were constantly being warned about beforehand.”