Blyth + Blyth expect payback within 10 months for Workspace

Online, November 20, 2009 (Newswire.com) - Blyth and Blyth is a consulting engineering business with offices in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London. They employ 80 people and have recently implemented Workspace to provide a robust and secure governance model for the handling of emails by the practice. The Workspace Email Management suite was designed to provide companies with a safe and secure store for emails and offer users a simple way of filing and accessing project related data. The Email Suite can be purchased as a stand alone product or as part of the full Workspace system. Blyth and Blyth chose a phased approach to the implementation and decided to address their email management issues first.

Blyth and Blyth's procedures for managing emails had been devised some time ago when the volume of emails were relatively low. Every email that came into the business was printed out and filed in a hard copy project folder. As a result each office had numerous hard copy folders; IT Manager, Graeme Campbell estimates that 90% of hard copy storage is email. At the end of a project the hard copy emails were scanned and archived electronically. Furthermore the hard copy storage procedures were not meeting users needs for gaining access to emails; as a result users invented their own procedures for electronically storing emails. Graeme explains, "Users would create their own folder structures on the server, this was taking up valuable space and we had security concerns over the volumes of emails stored locally on PCs and laptops. By keeping everything in hard copy and only archiving at the end of a project Blyth and Blyth were also leaving themselves exposed to data loss.

Blyth and Blyth assessed a few solutions to address their email management needs. In the end it was the extensible nature of the Workspace product and client references which separated Union Square from the rest. Graeme comments, "We often work on projects with Michael Laird Architects who have been using Workspace for a few years; it was reassuring to see the product in use and receive such a positive response some considerable time after the initial implementation."

Blyth and Blyth have gone live with the Workspace Email Management solution, Email Vault and the Workspace's corporate database of contacts and projects. This includes integration with Outlook so users can email Workspace contacts direct from Outlook and emails can be instantly dragged and dropped into Workspace within Outlook. Although email was the real driver behind the project, the contacts functionality has gone down extremely well with the user base, "Previously everyone kept their own contacts list in Outlook or in excel spreadsheets, now we have one centralised contacts database that can be accessed by anyone in the company - regardless of where they are physically located." The email vault is fantastic and enables anyone in the business to find any email that they have send or received based on keywords, contacts and date parameters. "The email vault gives us complete confidence that we will be able to find any email sent or receive by the practice in seconds," comments Graeme.

Graeme has calculated the time taken to print and file emails, the cost of keeping hard copies of emails and the time spend searching for emails. Having done this he estimates that Workspace will pay for itself in less than 10 months. Blyth and Blyth are now reviewing a proposal to introduce the full document management system. This would ensure that all documents and drawings are as easy to file and search for as emails are now. To train users on the system, Blyth and Blyth used the new Workspace e-learning service, which meant that everyone could complete training online when it was suitable for them. "Overall we are very pleased with the Workspace implementation; the project has gone to plan and has been delivered by Union Square on time and within budget. We also have peace of mind that from a compliance perspective we are fully backed up and that our users have fast access to the information they need."