The challenge

Prior to implementing an email management solution, Advanced Roofing used a system called Workspace where they were able to save their emails. Louise Hunt, Operations Manager at Advanced Roofing, explained, “Workspace was an old system that we had, and it wasn’t used to its best ability. Some people used it and some didn’t. Nobody really got any training so it was very messy.”

After the firm moved away from Workspace, they trialled Proforms to see if their site teams would use the successful tool, and then they moved to ViewPoint. However, with these technological changes, they were no longer able to capture emails. Louise commented, “If someone left the business, their emails disappeared with them. We wanted to save and centralise emails.”

There was an incident where the Advanced Roofing team needed to locate emails from 8 years ago, and they managed to find these emails with great difficulty, but “all of a sudden, that risk was highlighted that we weren’t saving emails centrally.”

Louise continued, “We didn’t want to be exposed for costs that aren’t our fault just for the sake of finding a few emails, and we saved money rectifying an issue that wasn’t our fault.”

Advanced Roofing needed an email management solution that was simple and easy to use, integrated into Outlook and could be used across the entire team.

The results

Louise was introduced to Mail Manager by the firm’s IT Manager, and “it was exactly what we were looking for.”

When asked to compare life before and after Mail Manager, Louise said, “Before, everything was just on Outlook. Everybody had their own email account, and we tried to get everybody to file the same way in project folders, and we would drag these across to ViewPoint. But, we were unable to define a search. We needed something central like Mail Manager to be able to search by project or on keywords.”

“Before it wasn’t very good, but now it’s getting better every day as more and more people use Mail Manager. We have a central system that we can access if somebody is off sick and we know there is an important email floating about, we know that we can go into Mail Manager and find that email.”

“Mail Manager is very easy to use, it’s just a right click, and off you go. It’s getting quite good at recognising project references and keywords which makes things easier. It’s quite clever and definitely helps with user errors.”

When questioned what advice she would give to people considering Mail Manager, Louise responded, “I definitely recommend looking at it. It’s only going to be beneficial. For some projects, we need to keep information for 12 years, and we can’t really rely on users to keep those emails. With Mail Manager, we can be confident that we can find the email that protects the Company.”

“Most of our emails are related to contracts and commercial issues, and we need to have these to hand. If a contractor is to say, in five years’ time, that we didn’t do something or that they weren’t contracted to do something, we can literally go back to the email now and find the proof we need. We need to protect ourselves, and we can protect the company with Mail Manager.”

“Mail Manager is efficient as opposed to relying on users. We’re already seeing the benefits of it, and it hasn’t even been a year yet!”