In2 Engineering Design Partnership (In2) is a modern MEP service engineering consultancy firm, with offices throughout Ireland and the UK. Their projects are based across a wide range of building sectors, and their combination of specialist expertise in innovative passive design, sustainability and building simulation techniques is integral to their approach.
In2's email management headache
Prior to implementing Mail Manager, In2 faced a common issue many other AEC firms face. They struggled to file their emails into job folders, had huge server storage issues due to the number of project emails their company was working with, and their staff were unable to sort through and find the information they needed when they needed it.
Graeme Parker, Director at In2 explained, "We have a vast amount of email and correspondence that we need to hold on to, and it's a bit of a daunting task when you're talking about terabytes and terabytes of information. Particularly when it's duplicated which would happen a lot."
"If three people on the same team had the same email with a 10-megabyte attachment, our server was storing that and it was causing a serious backlog. Before we got Mail Manager, our biggest problem was storage and that the server was just crammed constantly with duplicates of the same email. When we went back through it, we found that we had the same email 10-20 times, plus every reply and every forward of the same email. This was actually causing the servers to crash and lose data, especially when we started to open multiple offices."
What In2 really needed was a software solution to remove the strains on their servers, and allow their expanding team to file their important project emails with ease.
Making the move away from Deltek to Mail Manager
Initially, In2 purchased Deltek's Union Square solution. But, the firm quickly found that it did not offer the fixes they were looking for. Graeme described Deltek as "a jack of all trades that didn't do exactly what we wanted on the email front", and they quickly found themselves in the same hot water.
Graeme explained, "Deltek was a jack of all trades. It was trying to do too much which would be fine if it was doing what I needed it to do, but it wasn't. We started to lose confidence when engineers went back to find an email and they were reporting that they couldn't find it. This would raise questions of, 'well okay you can't find that email, but what other emails have been lost?'"
Graeme continued, "An email can sometimes be your only defence two years after an event so they are critical, more so than anything else, and that's what spurred us to start looking around. It [Deltek] also wasn't a streamlined interface with Outlook and so in order to store or file away the emails, it was a little bit involved and not quite as intuitive. Something we found ultimately was that the engineers couldn't be bothered to go through all the steps and all the hoops to store their emails. So, we ended up paying for a very expensive system that no one was using and having the same issue we were always having on the server with people storing 20,000 emails on their desktops."
Transitioning to Mail Manager's email filing solution
Once In2 made the decision to replace Deltek through the organisation, they quickly found their email headaches became much easier to manage. The installation process was simple, and they were able to set up their Mail Manager licenses and filing locations in a way that worked for their firm with a group policy.
When asked about how In2's employees felt with the firm's email management changes, Graeme responded, "No matter what you do in this world, if you try and change something there will be resistance. But once people started to realise Mail Manager was easier to use and was less involved, it started to pave the way for people to start using it. Ultimately, all the engineers want is an easy life. They don't want to be clicking buttons for half a day just to store an email, so from that point of view it's quite easy now."
"It's as easy to store an email than it is not to store, so it makes it much easier to encourage the engineers to actually adopt the system."
In2 are one of our customers who have a number of departments including HR, IT and finance which allows everyone in the organisation to keep their inboxes tidy, and have confidence that they will be able to find all the information they need. Project teams are no longer clogging up their server with duplicate emails with Mail Manager's intelligent software, plus people aren't being CC'd in emails they don't necessarily need as they can quickly search through any email related to a project.
To hear more about In2 Engineering Design Partnership's experience implementing Mail Manager, you can access our on-demand webinar here. Or to see Mail Manager in action, book a demo with our team today.
