More than 250 years ago, Benjamin Franklin proclaimed “remember that time is money” in an essay entitled Advice to a Young Tradesman. The United States Founding Father and renowned writer, philosopher, diplomat and inventor, among multiple professions, made the point that when an individual is paid for the amount of time they spend working it is vital to minimise the amount of time wasted on frivolous pursuits.
The observation that less time wasted increases productivity and profitability still rings true for modern-day businesses. However, many continue to waste money on ineffective processes, software and technologies. For example, the most common examples of businesses wasting money include not tracking their expenses, paying for too many software services and not challenging their employees to meet their potential.
The cost of failing to automate
Another key failing that sees many organisations waste valuable time and money is not implementing automation tools. So many tasks that a business carries out can be automated to eliminate hours of carrying out tedious manual work, from automating email newsletters and social media posts to scheduling meetings.
Automating is often a simple task that can save employees huge amounts of time and enables them to focus their attention on tasks that deliver value to the business.
One of the leading examples of this is businesses spending hours hunting for information that’s locked away across their various disparate networks, storage systems and email browsers. This is especially costly given that 75% of project data is stored within email systems, according to the Association for Information and Image Management, which means not being able to access it costs both time and money.
Often, because staff have left the business or their accounts aren’t publicly available, that information is lost altogether, which can be even more costly for businesses that
Removing arduous admin
Mail Manager seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Outlook to simplify the previously arduous, time-intensive task of filing, finding, sharing and storing emails. It reduces the time and complexity of filing and searching for emails and attachments. It simplifies every part of the process, which gives businesses peace of mind that all their important data is safe and can be found at the click of a button, in one central location.
The Outlook add-in learns businesses’ filing behaviours, then uses this insight to prompt employees to file emails to suggested locations. Emails are centrally filed alongside other client and project information, ensuring it is quick and easy to find and access. Furthermore, if multiple people across the organisation file the same email the program will automatically remove duplicate files.
This automated approach to email provides business with several key benefits:
- Quick and easy filing: Emails are filed as soon as they are sent or received by employees, as well as automatically keeping or discarding attachments. This can save up to two hours per day, per employee.
- Simple search: Businesses can search for any keyword or between a specific date and time range and the software will generate a list of relevant results within seconds. It searches email headers, body text and attachment names, saving people time and increasing efficiency by ensuring they no longer have to dig through their inboxes.
- Removing employee reliance: Employees inevitably file emails in places that make it difficult for businesses to discover information. Businesses can now standardise filing processes across the organisation and remove this reliance on staff’s bad practices.
- Storage saving: Automated filing of emails slashes the space required to store email attachments and eliminates the possibility of duplication.
- Enhanced collaboration: Emails are automatically filed into team folders, which makes them accessible to all members of a project and ensures everyone can collaborate on documents regardless of whether owners are sick or on holiday.
Businesses can improve email management performance by enhancing the agility and efficiency of their systems to ensure information held in emails is easily sharable. To do this, it’s vital to deploy an email management application that can:
- Make all emails accessible to everyone across the organisation, unless the information included is highly sensitive.
- Prompt users to save both sent and received emails to shared files.
- Help users to find emails in seconds when searching across an entire project.
- Minimise the size of inboxes, making them easier to search and more manageable for employees.
- Provide easy access and the ability to file when employees are working remotely.
Benjamin Franklin’s timeless observation that “time is money” still rings true, yet all too often organisations are throwing both away with inefficient processes.
To find out how Mail Manager can help your business take control of your inboxes and find any project information within seconds, read our case study with global consulting firm WSP.
