Guildprime Specialist Contracts is a specialist shopfitter and refurbishment contractor. It turns retailers’ designs into reality with detailed, dynamic and sustainable shop fit-outs. Guildprime’s work includes luxury brands, flagship retail refurbishments and high-end commercial spaces, as well as high-class residential buildings in the UK, Europe, Russia, the Middle East and South America.
Founded in 1985, Guildprime quickly progressed from offering shop-fitting services to providing a diverse range of unrivalled specialist contract services. Its team of skilled professional enjoys an unenviable reputation for quality, service delivery and growth.
Guildprime has been working with Mail Manager since 2012 and is reaping the benefits of its services from a legal, productivity and technical standpoint.
The challenge
Guildprime had suffered a couple of incidents with long-term clients not paying money they owed upon the completion of projects. The company’s existing systems made it difficult to track their communications with clients, efficiently file and store messages and find the information they needed to appease any disputes.
As Paul White, IT Manager and Setter-Out at Guildprime, says: “It was very difficult to try and trace emails as we didn't have backups of our individual mailbox's, which meant going through individual inboxes to try to find emails from over eight years ago. It was a nigh-on impossible task.” A good example of this issue was a client in Nicosia, in Cyprus. As Paul explains: “Their legal system won’t even look at an issue for five years, and it ended up taking about nine or ten years for our MD to get the money out of them. That was one of the key reasons that made us look for a service that would help us with future-proofing the business from the legal side of things. We realised that you need to have a paper trail just in case you don’t get paid.”
Guildprime knew they needed to find a solution to this problem, but struggled to find one that was appropriate and affordable. As Paul says: “We needed to find a tool that would store and file emails, archive them and arrange them so you could find them easily for multiple uses. I was hunting for something for over a year and couldn’t find anything that would save us the time and hassle and was near the budget we wanted to spend.”
One alternative considered was Sharepoint but, as Paul explains, it wasn’t a suitable option for the business. “I looked at the Sharepoint route but it was too involved,” he said. “The expenditure and training would almost create the need for a new person in a new role, and the total cost of ownership would have been ridiculous.”
The solution
When Guildprime first signed up to Mail Manager it was half the size of the current company, but the service has grown as the business expands. The company is split into two departments that have their own separate filing locations while timestamps are attached to all emails. With each new project, the team sets up shortcuts that sends emails into specific folders to simplify the task of finding information.
As Paul says: “Having everything in one central location saved on our server was essential. Our server is backed up so that gives me two lines of redundancy, with Mail Manager backing up users and then the server is backed up off-site.
“Now, even if someone leaves the company or goes on holiday, you’ve got traceability of what they’ve been sending and instant access to emails people are sending about relating to projects.” Summarising his experience of working with Mail Manager, Paul said: “You’d be surprised how useful it is, and it’s quite scalable whether you have five or 50 users. The software only gets better as more people use it. The more it’s used the better information is."
“Our Mail Manager setup was done within an hour, we got the trial up and running and as the software has grown and had updates it’s improved further. What I can do with it now, compared to when I started, has really grown. I’ve got nothing but good things to say about it.”
Now, even if someone leaves the company or goes on holiday, you’ve got traceability of what they’ve been sending and instant access to emails people are sending about relating to projects.