If you work in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Owner/Operator (AECO) industry, you will know that email management is essential to organizing the primary mode of communication on large-scale projects. Even with the proliferation of other communication methods, such as instant messaging or video conferencing, the most important decisions for your project will be recorded somewhere in your inbox and files.
For most of us, our email routine is an integral part of how we work, but keeping our inboxes clean can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s no wonder that many of us choose to rely on our email client’s search function to find critical information. Effective communication is the foundation upon which successful construction projects are built. With contractors, architects, and engineers collaborating in various phases of a project, streamlined communication is essential to ensure projects stay on track, meet deadlines, and stay on budget. Among the many tools at our disposal, email management platforms such as Newforma Konekt stand out as critical components in ensuring that construction projects stay on track, on time and on budget.
Implementation of email management in your projects
Consider this: Construction projects require large teams of stakeholders, and companies often manage multiple projects at once. So emails come in every hour to update you on the progress of one thing, ask questions for another, and report bottlenecks and other issues. Additionally, these emails should be accessible to your entire team, so that specific questions can be answered by the right people. And, all these emails must be archived or risk being lost. With Newforma Konekt, you can archive your emails to a specific project, ensuring critical information is available to team members who need it. All project members who should have access to particular email chains can easily retrieve them from the platform. Newforma Konekt also gives you the option to automatically archive past emails in any given thread.
With the right project information platform, nothing gets lost in email chains and you know how to follow up
Archive emails smartly and with fewer steps.
If you can save steps in your workflow, you will save time. So when you’re going through your countless daily emails, you can use Newforma Konekt’s Outlook add-in to let you and your staff select one or more emails to present to your project. From there, your project data includes all information back and forth from your primary communication tool, email, including attachments. Also, if more than one team member sends the same email, perhaps because they both saw the email and both took the same initiative to introduce it to the project, only one copy is saved, of so there is no confusion. Newforma Konekt also has a smart email file, based on an advanced project prediction algorithm, so you and your team only need to validate the information from the directions, instead of having to type -everything every time. Finally, you can further reduce the steps in your workflow with Newforma Konekt’s Project Email Address feature, which allows you and your team to include the project email address in the “send” , “forward” or “reply all” and emails and let them be. automatically archived to your project.
It’s much easier to collaborate when everyone’s communications are organized.
stock.adobe.com
Start Shipping and RFI workflows directly from Outlook and an email.
And while we’re on the subject of saving time, let’s talk about reducing the number of steps you need to take to submit and process submissions and RFIs, and making sure you can track their progress. Newforma Konekt allows you to add incoming emails for RFI or Submittal workflow items to projects directly from Outlook using a side panel. You do not need to download the submission document or RFI and re-enter all the information on a separate form before it can be processed. Newforma Konekt extracts key information from the email, then auto-populates and logs a new submission or RFI into Newforma Konekt, so your team or extended stakeholders can start solving them.
Search it all.
And here we come to the biggest and best time saver offered by Newforma Konekt’s email management features: the ability to search for anything in your project and aggregate it in one place. Whether you’re searching for keywords within emails or attachments, submissions and RFIs, specific issues and action items, or by specific file types, you can find it all in Newforma Konekt.
Your staff can quickly find any buried information, no matter how big your project.
What will you do with more time in your day?
Even the best-managed large-scale construction project will be multifaceted and complex, with countless moving parts, stakeholder teams, and ever-growing models. And at the center is communication: making sure the people you work with are informed and ready to act when necessary. With the right tool to help you manage your inbox, email can go from a never-ending wave of chaos to a clear, well-stocked library that contains everything you and your team need. Email continues to serve as a central hub for project information, and managing it properly ensures accountability, streamlines communication, aids compliance, mitigates litigation risks, and ultimately saves time and resources. To learn more about how Newforma Konekt can help you manage your construction projects through optimized email management, visit us here.
Spend less time sorting through emails and more time doing the work you really love
stock.adobe.com
