The challenge

Prior to signing up to Mail Manager, Sands Consultants had an issue with the way emails were filed and saved. Bex Morey, Office Manager at Sands Consultants, commented: “We had this huge problem with the way our emails were being saved in the first place. They were received into a storage system, and we were reaching a point where our server couldn’t take any more information. We had to look at something that would manage the process for us.”

By nature of their business, Sands received a lot of emails, with a number of employees on copy. Bex continued: “Everyone in the company had massive amounts of emails in their inbox, and then all of that information was being saved to the server five times over, or not being saved at all. There was tons of duplication so Mail Manager was a no-brainer for us.”

The results

Sands have been a customer of Mail Manager for over two years now. Mail Manager was originally recommended to Bex by a supplier they were working with at the time, and upon asking around, discovered that a number of their clients and other suppliers were using the software as well. After hearing that their colleagues had found success, Sands Consultants began conversations with Mail Manager and got everything set up.

Bex commented: “I had a session with Mail Manager to run through the software and give it an initial assessment as to whether it would work for us. I was absolutely wowed by Mail Manager and it was exactly what the directors were after.”

She continued: “One of the biggest things that attracted us to Mail Manager was the fact that it was produced in coordination with the Arup group. We are engineers so if a construction-based business is saying that it works in that sort of environment, we were sure it would work for us.”

Once Sands Consultants were ready to implement Mail Manager, everything was installed within a few days. Bex described the implementation process as: “Very, very easy. There was hardly any downtime with it, so within 48-hours, all of our staff were trained up and it was ready to go.”

Three different departments at Sands Consultants use Mail Manager, their administration team, civil engineers and their structural engineers. Each of these departments had different ways of storing information, and different types of projects. Bex explained: “The admin side is very different and deals with a lot of internal and confidential information. One thing we were really impressed with was the control that you get with Mail Manager for saving confidential information.”

“One of the major things we use it for as a department is looking at cost and fee information. We’ve been able to track down where a client has agreed to a fee and resolve invoice queries in an instant. The general ease of the system and the fact that we can save project information to it is brilliant. We’re finding everything is much more up to date and we don’t find ourselves chasing around the office to get the information we need. It’s had a massive impact on how efficient our business is.”

“The biggest help for us was the fact that you can instantaneously search for a project and see who within the company has been working on it. So, when you get that call on a Friday afternoon and someone needs something urgently but doesn’t know who to speak to or who they needed was on holiday, you can easily see that trail of information. If we have members of staff resign or go on holiday, we’re no longer left with an inbox full of thousands of emails without the capacity to do anything about it.

“One email could save us tens of thousands of pounds in an insurance claim, and to me, that is the cost of losing an email. But it’s not an issue for us anymore, we don’t have that stress.”