Jerram Falkus
Multi-faceted construction organisation that offers traditional values and experience coupled with modern, innovative service providing excellence at every stageIt’s three specialist divisions offer a full construction and joinery service to clients in commercial and industrial, education, community, healthcare, sports and leisure, residential, heritage, and social housing.
Challenges
Email has become the de facto means of communication between all parties involved in construction projects. Documents and drawings are shared by email. Requirements, instructions and change requests are delivered by email. Discussions are conducted by email and decisions recorded in them. Each project at Jerram Falkus can result in many thousands of emails and attachments.
At any one time, people at Jerram Falkus can be working on multiple projects. They may join them after they have started or before they end. Previously, there wasn’t an easy way to get new team members up to speed or transfer knowledge from those moving on. People would have no choice but to forward around large numbers of emails. If they wanted to keep other project team members informed, the answer was to copy them in. In addition all emails were individually led as Outlook Unicode files according to job which was time consuming, led to duplicates and increased storage space.
Similarly, senior managers would need to be copied on everything. Otherwise, they may not be aware of new developments or issues, making supervision more time-consuming than it ought to be. The downside, of course, was their inboxes were being clogged up and they spent many hours reading emails just in case they contained something that they needed to know about.
Jerram Falkus is BS EN ISO 9001 accredited. Each project undertaken has a Quality Plan to control overall performance and ensure that every requirement is addressed and achieved. Regular audits of all company activities ensure that dened procedures are always followed. In addition, the company has its own internal framework for Continuous Improvement. Management of electronic correspondence is an important facet of meeting Jerram Falkus’ commitment to quality.
Challenges
- No single source of all project correspondence.
- Difficulty in collaborating on projects / onboarding new team members.
- Time consuming email filing and retrieval.
Solutions
- Knowledgemill Email Filer
Results
- Filing and retrieval of emails and attachments is virtually automatic.
- Improved access to information leads to less searching, more finding.
- Increased productivity and better client service.
- Standard folder templates enforce company’s best practice and ISO 9001 quality management compliance.
- Better management oversight and control.
Solution
All email correspondence is now led in project folders with a standard sub-folder template which matches Jerram Falkus’ best practice business process.
Everyone uses Knowledgemill, so an email only needs to be led once, by one employee. Thereafter, all replies and forwards are automatically led ensuring that the project is up-to-date in real time. If a director wants to know anything that is relevant to a project then it is simply a click away in their shared Knowledgemill folders.
William Jerram, Director, explains, “Before implementing Knowledgemill Mail Manager, finding key information could be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Now all our projects have a standard folder structure and Knowledgemill’s powerful search and filtering capabilities gives me what I’m looking for in seconds”.
Results
Saving time and effort – Automated filing has cut down the need at Jerram Falkus for people to spend time filing emails. Better still, it dramatically reduces the time spent looking for emails or asking colleagues for information or forwarding and cc’ing – every email from everyone and every attachment to a particular case is gathered together in a folder in Outlook, which is easy to scan by eye or search and filter.
Working more effectively as a team – the whole team at Jerram Falkus use the same project folders, so everyone is completely up-to-date at all times, without ever having to copy or forward to colleagues. ‘Very simply, we send and receive at least 30% less mail’ says William.
Maintaining complete records – Jerram Falkus now keep a comprehensive record of all electronic communication, classified and stored by client and project. This is great for regulatory compliance, internal process compliance, management overview and client confidence.
Very simply, we send and receive at least 30% less mail
Impressing clients by always being well-informed – Whether it’s taking a query for a colleague or providing relationship continuity over holidays or staff changes, every member of the team can see the latest communication thread.
Simplicity of adoption – introducing 100% compulsory filing and a management information system would normally be pretty traumatic. But because Knowledgemill Mail Manager works intuitively just like a part of Outlook, and because filing is mostly automatic, users have no problem learning to use it and there is little cultural change.
Read our featured industry case studies
