If you work in Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Owner/Operator (AECO) industry, you’ll know that email management is essential for organizing the primary mode of communication on large-scale projects. Even with the proliferation of other communications methods, just as instant messages, or video conferencing, the most important decisions for your project will be recorded somewhere in your inbox and archives.
For most of us, our email routine is integral to how we work, but keeping inboxes clean can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s little wonder that so many of us choose to rely on the search function of our email client to find critical information. Effective communication is the bedrock upon which successful construction projects are built. With contractors, architects and engineers collaborating across various phases of a project, streamlined communication is essential for ensuring projects stay on track, meet deadlines and adhere to budgets. Among the myriad tools at our disposal, email management platforms – like Newforma Konekt -- stand out as critical components for ensuring that construction projects remain on track, on deadlines and on budget.
Implementing email management on your projects
Consider this: construction projects require large teams of stakeholders and firms often manage several projects at once. So, emails are flying in every hour letting you know of progress for one thing, asking questions for another, and reporting bottlenecks and other issues. What’s more, these emails need to be accessible to your whole team, so that specific questions can be answered by the right people. And, all these emails need to be filed or they risk getting lost. With Newforma Konekt, you can file your emails to a given project, which ensures that critical information is available to the team members who need it. Everyone on the project who should have access to particular email chains can easily retrieve them from the platform. Newforma Konekt also gives you the option of automatically filing previous emails in any given thread.
File emails intelligently and with fewer steps.
If you can save steps in your workflow, you’ll save time. So, when you’re trudging 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 file to your project. From there, your project data includes all the back-and-forth of your primary communication tool – email – including your attachments. And what’s more, if more than one team member files the same email – maybe because they both saw the email and both took the same initiative to file it to the project – only one copy is saved, so there’s no confusion. Newforma Konekt also has intelligent email filing, based on an advanced project prediction algorithm, so that you and your team only need to validate the information in the prompts, instead of having to type everything in each time. Finally, you can cut your workflow steps even more with Newforma Konekt’s Project Email Addressing feature, which lets you and your team include the project’s email address on their “send”, “forward”, or “reply all” and emails and let them be filed automatically to your project.
Initiate Submittal and RFI workflows directly from Outlook and an email.
And while we’re on the topic of saving time, let’s talk about reducing the number of steps you need to file and process submittals and RFIs, and ensuring that you can track their progress. Newforma Konekt lets you add incoming emails for RFI or Submittal workflow items to projects directly from Outlook through a side-pane. There’s no need to download the submittal or RFI document and re-enter all the information into a separate form before it can be processed. Newforma Konekt extracts key information from the email, then auto-populates and logs a new Submittal or RFI in Newforma Konekt, so that your team or extended stakeholders can get started on resolving it.
Search everything.
And here we come to the biggest, best time-saver that Newforma Konekt’s email management features offer: the ability to search for anything in your project and aggregate it into one place. Whether you’re looking for keywords within emails or attachments, submittals 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 large your project is.
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 heart of it is communication: making sure the people you work with are informed and poised to act where needed. With the right tool to help you manage your inbox, email can go from being a never-ending wave of chaos to being a clear, well-stocked library that holds everything you and your team need. Email continues to serve as a central hub for project information and managing it right ensures accountability, streamlines communication, aids in compliance, mitigates litigation risks and ultimately saves time and resources. For more information on how Newforma Konekt can help you manage your construction projects through optimized email management, visit us here.
