Have you got a system for storing your emails? When as much as 90% of correspondence on a project is sent electronically, you don’t want people saving messages in their personal inboxes, or worse, deleting them.

The problem arises when, six years down the line, there’s a claim and you can’t dig out the relevant information.

Lawyer Keith Lonsdale, a partner at Berryman Lace Mawer, advises that all correspondence should be kept for a minimum of seven years. ‘Issues usually emerge within two or three years but in rare cases it can be 10 or 11 years,’ he says. ‘With sensitive cases where you think there could be a problem, you should hang on to them for 15 years.’

Lonsdale notes an increase in late claims against consultants. ‘Perhaps the developer does not get the tenant let he wanted or make the sale. Then you tend to see an issue which you thought was a minor one coming to a head two or three years after the end of a project.’

Emails are vital in any claim, and the way firms organise them – as with any records – varies from excellent to appalling, according to Lonsdale. And people are concerned: a recent seminar on the subject held by knowledge management firm Union Square, at which Lonsdale spoke, was sold out.

Having the relevant emails at your fingertips can give you the upper hand in a claims situation. Will Yandell, managing director of Union Square, which supplies knowledge management systems to construction firms, reports that specialist contractors in particular see this as a huge benefit.

Union Square has just added an extra ‘vaulting’ function to its Workspace software to store every email sent to and from a company. Although Workspace has an email management function which allows users to drag and drop emails into the relevant project files, users wanted the vaulting function as a back up because some people are not as good as others with their filing.

Union Square suggests the following seven-step plan to avoid getting caught out with e-mails:

1 Don’t make the end user responsible for archiving emails.

2 Store EVERYTHING received and sent.

3 Don’t use the email system as a filing system for emails.

4 Use a database which can store emails in their native format.

5 Make sure emails can’t be tampered with in the archive – it could be important to show this later.

6 The system should make it easy to find emails at a later date.

7 Allow employees to access and share emails.

JCB tops brand poll

JCB is the strongest brand in construction, according to a ranking of the UK’s top 500 business brands from Superbrands. JCB was 62nd, followed by Tarmac (90), Balfour Beatty (111) and Sir Robert McAlpine (114). The BBC is the UK’s strongest brand followed by Microsoft and British Airways.

Source

Construction Manager