The challenge

The problem
When Harpreet joined Enjoy Design, he felt the impact of not having Mail Manager as a tool to rely on. He said “When I started at Enjoy Design, I began working on new and unfamiliar projects so was required to familiarise myself with projects quickly and efficiently. This meant digging through numerous Windows Explorer and Microsoft Outlook folders or searching through individual emails all of which felt quite a laborious and inefficient way of searching and didn’t guarantee that I was seeing the ‘whole picture’ as I was not always able to find email responses and chains.”

Due to the success of the Practice, Enjoy Design almost doubled in size within the space of a single year. Harpreet said: “Suddenly you find yourself in a much bigger company in a short period of time and subsequently, you are taking on much more complex schemes meaning more correspondence and information traffic is being generated. It quickly became apparent that in order to remain efficient and on top of the information, a tool for filing, storing, tracking and locating information was a necessity for the Practice."

There was the risk of important emails being left locked in individual inboxes, which were then unavailable to the wider teams, making the process of moving on to new projects or helping colleagues difficult. Even when emails were filed, it was difficult to find the relevant information as it was common to have ‘RE’ or ‘FW’ in the subject line.

Harpreet said: “I was only without Mail Manager for a couple of months, but I knew the Practice would be a lot more efficient with it.”

The solution

In most architectural companies the Project Lead will receive all relevant emails, whilst others in the team may not always get CC’d in on the correspondence. After Mail Manager was implemented, everyone quickly had access to all project information as it was filed in a central location regardless of who received the email.

Harpreet explained: “The big thing for us was how it allows you to share the information ‘in-house’. The convenience of having a tool that enables you to very quickly access information that is not saved on your local drive solves a lot of our challenges.”

He described the main benefits of working with Mail Manager: “The software prompts you to save things when you send, open or close down, reminding you to file ‘on-the-fly’. It’s far more efficient to do that as and when you are working on email correspondence, instead of doing it in bulk at the end of the month which in itself becomes a time-consuming task. Additionally, it makes those emails instantly available to anyone in the team who may not have been originally copied in. Mail Manager pushes you to share the information you send and receive, stopping you from keeping it to yourself.”

The search facility is also a huge benefit for Enjoy Design. He said: “In the architecture industry you are quite often looking back at historic correspondence, looking for specific correspondence, comments and instructions. You need to file this information out of the way but ensure you still have it accessible when needed, so Mail Manager’s powerful search functionality is absolutely key for us.”

“Mail Manager allows you to keep your PC clog-free because it makes it easy to file and search. Our teams don’t feel it’s extra work looking for something, as if they did, they wouldn’t bother filing. They know the emails will be accessible when they need it, avoiding frustration. Basically, you forget it’s an installed software.”

Harpreet also explained how easy it is to overlook how much time people spend searching: “Most of the time it’s not about finding that one email, it’s about finding the responses to that email – the full chain. It’s extremely time-consuming without this software.” Harpreet added Mail Manager will make you think, ‘how could I ever work without it?’.

Summarising, he said: “Without Mail Manager, efficiency would decrease as more time would be spent looking for particular and specific correspondence. As the team wouldn’t have easy access to the information or tailored searching options, frustration levels would inevitably go up since the information would no longer be at our fingertips. It would send us back to an archaic time.”