Gensler is an architecture and design firm with over 6,000 employees across 48 locations globally. In 2018, Gensler generated $1.232 billion in revenue, the most of any architecture firm in the United States.

Designing everything from office furniture to major sports stadiums with over 10,000 projects in 2,500 cities, and 80+ different languages, there’s a huge volume of vital data they have to handle through email.

At Gensler, it's of paramount importance that global teams synchronise their efforts on projects that span many offices, offsite job locations and third parties including outside agencies and clients. Many of the team members have demanding schedules and travel regularly.

It's crucial that Gensler manages projects quickly and efficiently and that all relevant information is available to the entire team in real time. Email is the backbone of most of this work.

Problem

As in most businesses, Gensler's email tended to stay in individual inboxes. Some people organised messages into Outlook subfolders, others never had time to maintain a filing protocol and just relied on time-consuming search options to retrieve vital past correspondence buried amongst thousands of emails.

As Gensler's mailboxes grew, the volume of collective emails for the size of the company’s operation quickly became a storage issue as well. To maintain acceptable levels of data on its Exchange Server, Gensler set an inbox limit of 250MB.

These email management issues were causing such damage to productivity that it was hitting the bottom line. That's when those at board level at Gensler started to take note.

As Ken Sanders, CIO of Gensler rightly says, “Email has become an essential form of business-to-business communication and leaving emails that often contain critical project information in separate Outlook inboxes is equivalent to leaving letters piled up on desks.”

Gensler knew they had a huge problem and looked to investigate document management systems for emails that allowed employees to have access to all project-specific emails and attachments without exceeding the inbox limit.

Requirement

After assessing many products and engaging in an extensive trial involving 200 staff, Mail Manager stood out to Gensler as the best tool on the market.

Built by Arup, a well-respected engineering firm that Gensler had worked with many times, Gensler saw Mail Manager as a safe pair of hands to handle their storage and email management needs.

The solution

Mail Manager integrates with Outlook to help Gensler employees file, find and share emails quickly and intuitively. Within the usual routine of checking emails, Mail Manager helps individual users designate filing destinations for each email as they are opened or sent.

When their team files multiple duplications of one email to the same designated shared team folder, Mail Manager automatically eliminates copies of duplicate emails to minimise storage space and redundancy.

Additionally, Mail Manager helps organisations adhere to quality assurance processes and treat emails with the same care afforded to important documents while reducing costs and time related to e-discovery.

Considering the size and scope of Gensler operations, Mail Manager was an easy-to-manage platform that did not require any intense user training, dedicated servers or additional hardware.

Mail Manager also met the needs of offsite workers with a compatible mobile application, which allowed field workers and travelling team members to use the tools remotely, even while offline, and sync immediately to the most up-to-date file-sharing once connected.

Results

Gensler made an initial purchase of 200 Mail Manager licenses but have since purchased it for their entire company. Their return on the investment has been significant.

“We calculated that by implementing Mail Manager, the weekly savings would be enormous compared to the cost of the software per person per day making it a 'no brainer' decision to implement,” says Monica Parrot, Quality Manager at Gensler.

Key benefits for Gensler

Mail Manager has saved five hours per week per person in administrative printing, file coding and hard copy filing
Mail Manager has saved 275 hours per week for project printing, file coding and hard copy filing by the 180 participants using Mail Manager
Mail Manager has enabled Gensler to comply with many quality assurance and statutory standards

Project details

Client: Gensler Architects

Industry: Architecture

Company Size: 6000+ Employees

Location: United States

Market: Global

Product: Mail Manager

Architecture & Design Team

Ideagen Mail Manager

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