Batchelar McDougall Consulting (BMC) is a Civil Engineering firm based in New Zealand, with offices in Wanaka, Queenstown, Christchurch and Invercargill. BMC specialise in the structural design and assessment of a wide range of buildings and structures, with extensive experience in projects from high-end residential to major commercial developments both nationally and internationally.
Why BMC were looking for an email management solution
Ian McKnight, CEO at Batchelar McDougall Consulting, is responsible for finding efficiencies and mitigating risk as a core component of his job. Ian noted that there had been eleven thousand emails in and out of business within the last three months.
Ian commented, "Having something that can actually add value to mitigate risk to the volume of communication is really important to a company our size, and it scales up with the bigger the business gets."
Ian continued to add, "We've had a lot of growth in the last few years, and Mail Manager is one of those tools that instantly helps transform. It's not a slow process. Onboarding, installing the software and getting comfortable with it happens really quickly, so it tidies up a lot of the discipline almost overnight."
As consultants, BMC is often one of many organisations or people involved in a project, and on every project, there are multiple threads and channels of communication. Ian explained, "Keeping on top of that from a project governance point of view is nearly impossible unless you've got some sort of global perspective on what's happening, and Mail Manager lets you do that."
"We're expected to be self-managing, there's no one else to lean on for managing this information, so if there's a gap, it's our fault entirely."
Using Mail Manager to coordinate information across offices
As an organisation, BMC is dispersed across the country. They often need to share information across their offices, and Mail Manager allows them to do so. Ian commented, "We do things in the real world and our team spends a lot of time outside, so we need the same information remotely as we have in our office."
"We operate all over the country and we're often out for days, weeks on a task, so coming home to download or sync with the mothership from an IT point of view isn't always practical. We need to be able to have that information back through and still have access while we're on the go."
BMC operates as a medium-size business and explains that they're not small enough to know everything that's going on but also not big enough to have an IT department that manages all of their systems. Ian continued, " So when we look for a software solution, whether it's a service or an internal plugin or something else, it's really important that the support is responsive, and we have had that response from Mail Manager."
BMC's onboarding experience with Mail Manager
When asked about the onboarding of Mail Manager, Ian explained, "Installing was so easy. The software is straightforward to install, you just follow the instructions and download it, and then it's there! Making your own decisions about what you're trying to achieve with Mail Manager is where you'll get value out of it."
"We onboarded the software in one go over a couple of days, a day at each office, and we included all of our projects, all of our people and our proposals straightaway. Every single piece of communication we have recorded somewhere for the last 15 years, in a day has been up and running in our system, that is magnificent."
When discussing their setup with Mail Manager, Ian explains that the firm stores communications in a server and SharePoint. He commented, "We do all our proposals and host all of our business files on SharePoint because it's collaborative, and we run all our project files on servers because of the file size demand and propriety format."
Ian summarised the setup of Mail Manager, "It's simple, you create a folder and save emails to it via Mail Manager, and it's near-instantaneous. So simple, there's not too much to say."
To hear more about Batchelar McDougall Consulting's experience using Mail Manager, you can access our on-demand webinar here. Or to see Mail Manager in action, book a demo with our team today!
