Single Destination Engineering, based in South Africa and Botswana, is a dynamic, innovative engineering consulting and design firm providing a broad range of engineering services.
Alicia Celliers, Mechanical Project Engineer at Single Destination Engineering, works in the power generation sector within the company. She told us that before implementing Mail Manager, there was a lot of uncertainty as they had no control if and where emails were being filed. They also had concerns surrounding employees leaving the business and not having access to their emails when needed.
As there was no archive process in place, the company had to deal with emails being left in individual inboxes and the company was reliant on each employee having to copy and paste emails onto a server. Additionally, past project documents were all classified in the same manner which made it difficult to find specific project files.
Single Destination Engineering started looking for an email management solution and the only software that ticked all the boxes was Mail Manager, which they found really easy to use after downloading a free trial.
As someone who was very organised already, initially Alicia didn’t see the need for an email management solution, apart from helping others, but after using Mail Manager, she saw the benefits, such as the search function, which she explained; “The search functionality of Mail Manager is being used more than the standard Outlook one as it is a lot better and more efficient.”
On the wider business benefits, she added: “It's a great improvement not having to copy and paste emails anymore into folders and, whether or not you are cc'd in an email, you can still find it at any time with a few clicks. This functionality is particularly important for us. Simultaneously, the solution is user-friendly, which was really good as some of our less digitally-fluent staff were able to easily use it.”
For Single Destination Engineering, it's reassuring to know all emails are stored in a central location, to be accessed no matter what happens to an employee, with secure locations that have a structure in place, only allowing people that need access to a certain location to retrieve emails. Alicia explained: “HR and finance documents are saved in a specific location with restricted access.”
Alicia also shared that the suggested locations, which come from Mail Manager's AI engine, work well. After implementing Mail Manager, they had good feedback and zero employee resistance, with only one training session.
She said: “Mail Manager pays for itself. Personally, I have come across Outlook crashing and not being able to use it properly, but never had this problem with Mail Manager. It’s an intelligent tool, with good AI behind it, by suggesting where to save certain files, and what you get compared to what you pay, it's not an expensive tool. It’s security for small investment.”
Often working on long projects, Alicia told us how, in one case, a 5 year long project meant she had to file all emails from the past 5 years and it took her 15 minutes, while she was working on other things, as the Mail Manager process was running in the background. That saved hours, if not days, of time.
To finish, she said: “The biggest benefit to Directors is being able to check the emails you are not cc’d in and evaluate how staff are dealing with clients. The biggest benefit to end-users is if someone new is starting in a project, they can get all the same historical information as any other member of staff that has been in the project for longer. The only thing I would change is to get Mail Manager earlier.”
