TGRWA are a structural engineering firm based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded in 1979, TGRWA specialises in new construction and the renovation of building structures. The firm typically works on projects in the retail, corporate, hospitality, mission-critical, healthcare, municipal and residential spaces. At present, TGRWA has a staff of 19 engineers and 4 BIM/CAD operators.
The email-related issues plaguing TGRWA
Before TGRWA implemented Mail Manager in 2019, the firm had some serious email management problems. Staff were rarely saving their project emails into centralised folders meaning that important business information was locked in individual inboxes. TGRWA had also struggled with staff creating large PST files at the end of a project for sent and received emails, so it was hard to access correspondence across any project when necessary.
Jon Andrews, Structural Engineer and Owner at TGRWA, expanded on this, "There was a lot of labour as far as getting our workforce to file emails. It wasn't something that was easy to centralise. There were really no search capabilities. Once something was filed, you needed to go find the PST and then just do a regular search through the Outlook search function, which is not very good."
On top of this, the OST files the firm used for Outlook were large and caused issues with their VDI setup. Jon explained, "The OST files that we have for Outlook tend to get large when people don't file their emails. This was causing some problems as far as storage on the server, and when user profiles needed to get recreated, it was causing some issues there."
So, there were several email-related issues TGRWA didn't have a solution for.
A 'painless and effortless' transition process
When Jon first heard about Mail Manager, he thought it sounded like a good investment for the firm, so he organised a 14-day free trial. Soon after, the software was rolled out across TGRWA.
With regards to the trial and his overall initial reaction to Mail Manager, Jon expressed, "I was impressed by what I was seeing, and when I did go through the two-week trial, it was so easy to use that I really did not see a need to investigate any alternatives. Honestly, I haven't seen anything else that seems like it would be comparable to this."
"I'd also say that I had a little bit of a bias towards Mail Manager as it was originally developed by Arup, which is a big architectural engineering firm, so I felt like there was kind of an understanding of how our particular industry works and I thought that was positive. I also had clients and other people that I work with who were using Mail Manager. I talked to a couple of them and were very happy."
On the implementation experience, Jon commented, "It was extremely easy. It was set up on our VDI system in probably 20-30 minutes and then we were able to push it out to all users. We had an onboarding call with Mail Manager that probably lasted half an hour, and it was extremely easy to access existing emails, and move and copy within Mail Manager. It's all done by the staff, and everybody got up to speed within a couple of days. It was a very easy transition."
Jon described the transition to Mail Manager as 'smooth, painless and effortless', as TGRWA had instant access to their project emails, and since the software plugs directly into Outlook, staff found it simple to use.
Why Mail Manager 'is the best software' TGRWA use
TGRWA set up Mail Manager to file into their existing project structure on their office-based server. So, upon rolling out Mail Manager, their staff were able to access all project email correspondence and use the powerful search tool to increase overall visibility quickly. Now, approximately 25 employees at the organisation are using Mail Manager on 240 active projects, and their feedback is very positive:
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"With Mail Manager, it's easy to file and more importantly find project emails."
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"I think Mail Manager is the best software that we have purchased."
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"Searching for emails across our entire email archive is quick and simple."
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Not only are their staff happy, but managers love Mail Manager too! Jon explained, "Since implementing Mail Manager, it's very easy to find emails through their search function, even if something's filed incorrectly. For the most part, because of the way the system works you generally don't file things in the wrong location, but if by chance you do, using the search tool you can search across all of the emails that are on our system within minutes. It's extremely easy to find something even if it's in the wrong location."
"We have access to all of the project emails and correspondence for all of our projects across the board, and it's very easy to segregate things out that may be sensitive and have them put into folders that are locked down for only certain individuals to use."
To hear more about TGRWA'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!
