Macris, Hendricks & Glascock P.A. (MHG) is a civil engineering firm located in Maryland, US. MHG is a leader in technological advancement and design evolution and has proven to be a reliable partner and a knowledgeable design team. The firm has built a solid reputation for providing professional services to public and private sector clients. Its goal has been to provide a superior service at a reasonable cost.
Life before Mail Manager
Patrick La Vay, Managing Principal & Senior Project Manager at MHG, recently joined us on a webinar where he discussed his experience implementing Mail Manager across the business. Before Mail Manager, the firm had no real email management process, which caused a great deal of grief to the firm.
Patrick commented, "Most of our staff were leaving their emails in their inbox. If you needed to go back and find something, it was searching through one of those inboxes, which have tens of thousands of emails. I was one of the only people, maybe a couple of others, that had some level of structure within Outlook."
MHG could not be confident that all project information was being seen and accurately maintained. Patrick explained, "You only really capture 50% of the situation and about 50% of the email traffic, and as we all know, a lot of the outgoing emails are just as important as incoming."
"At the end of a project, we didn't really have anywhere to file all those emails, so they just ended up in a PST file. It was very difficult and time-consuming to move those onto a network drive where they could be stored until the job had cleared out. Plus, if staff are on leave or someone left the company, there's no easy way to go back and find some of those emails."
Transitioning to using Mail Manager
When MHG first came across Mail Manager, they decided to kick off the process with a 30-day pilot. Patrick and other partners within the business tested the software across three projects. On the experience, Patrick commented, "It was really quick to set up, maybe 10-15 minutes to be installed on our machines. It's very self-explanatory, so I was kind of off to the races. It was very smooth."
During the pilot, Patrick had some questions regarding Mail Manager, but he found the process smooth. "Mail Manager were very willing to work with us to set out our company-specific details."
MHG since implementing Mail Manager
MHG has now been using Mail Manager for close to 6 months, rolling out the software to all project, management, administrative and key staff. Across the business, all users have found it easier to locate emails by Mail Manager's search function.
Patrick commented, "It has been really well received, no one has complained, and everyone really raves about it. Even someone like myself who did do some filing before finds things much faster to locate emails. The search function is much more useful than your typical Outlook search."
Mail Manager now files emails into the firm's current project folder structure on the office-based server, meaning that no extra admin needs to be done on the completion of a project. Patrick added, "They are all there already, there's no copy and paste or exporting to a network."
As many engineering firms experience, given the nature of their work, things can go wrong, and claims may arise. MHG has already benefited from using Mail Manager to protect themselves from disputes. Patrick commented, "We had to go back and show that we did X, Y, and Z. Someone was trying to blame us for something essentially. The Mail Manager cost already paid for itself with that one particular instance, where I was able to go back and say 'here's the email with the attachments, and here's what we said'."
Plus, all employees can now file on the go with the Mail Manager 365 Mobile App. "Filing emails through the mobile app is very important due to being out and about a lot. Even on vacation, I try keeping my inbox clean as a way of keeping my to-do list down. That's another good tool to manage emails. We had a wide acceptance and praise from our entire office."
Patrick summarised the setup of Mail Manager as, "It's just incredibly seamless to get started."
You can access our on-demand webinar here to hear more about Macris, Hendicks and Glascock P.A.'s experience using Mail Manager. Or to see Mail Manager in action, book a demo with our team today!
