Austin-Smith:Lord is a fast-growing multi-disciplinary practice covering architecture, landscape, design and interior design, all under the same umbrella.
With offices spread the length and breadth of the UK, from Glasgow to Cardiff, they have a real presence across the country.
These locations allow them to cover a broad range of sectors. They have clients in a variety of industries, from healthcare to transport, from education to the arts. Their clients range from the very large to small.
The challenge
Austin-Smith:Lord works on a large range of projects across their offices daily, with teams scattered strategically to meet the needs of their clients. Initially, the practice was set-up as individual sites, introducing a fundamental challenge around collaboration and visibility across projects.
The offices were working on projects together, but the members did not have access to all the project emails they needed. It became apparent that the business would have to be aligned, and the first step in doing this was to introduce Microsoft Exchange for a unified email system.
Whilst this certainly had its benefits, the solution would often buckle under the sheer weight of employee’s inboxes. Because of this, their next priority was to tackle how staff were organising their own inboxes, along with implementing a process of tracking important project correspondences in an efficient and organised manner.
The Requirement
Austin-Smith:Lord was overwhelmed with information. They needed to implement an email management tool fast.
They contacted both their competitors and their own clients in the market, to understand what offerings were available. They then drew up a shortlist of potential solutions that would be able to help them. Mail Manager, the Outlook add-in developed by Arup, was a strong contender.
David Price, IT Manager for the whole practice, immediately identified Mail Manager as an agile tool that could reduce the level of risk Austin-Smith:Lord was exposed to, increase productivity and foster collaboration across the newly integrated business.
Shortly after identifying Mail Manager, David, along with Austin-Smith:Lord’s steering group of colleagues built a report around Mail Manager and its potential benefits to the company.
They approved the decision to move forward after getting positive recommendations from the team.
The decision process
Austin-Smith:Lord were going through a major internal upheaval at the time and didn’t want a solution that would require massive investment, both in terms of time and money.
The speed of installation of Mail Manager was a crucial factor in their decision to move forward with us.
The results
Mail Manager is now being used consistently across all sites of the business, with it being an integral part of the formal induction process for new employees.
As the solution has developed over its ten years at Austin- Smith:Lord, it has simply become a way of life at the company, and everyone is now filing their project emails both consistently and centrally.
They have found access to important project correspondence invaluable. For example, when they had to ensure that they had adhered to strict building regulation for an archived project when all members of the team on the project had left the business.
Finding such evidence would have taken days or weeks of IT resource, that’s assuming they could have found it at all, but with the help of Mail Manager’s powerful search, took less than two seconds.
Mail Manager can easily be implemented across a business rapidly as the add-in is intuitive for staff to use without much training, and was deployed across Austin-Smith:Lord’s existing infrastructure in a few weeks.