Independent car parts and accessories retailer Motor World, which has a turnover of over £50 million, previously needed eyes in the back of its head to manage the emails of its 900 employees spread across 227 branches.

Independent car parts and accessories retailer Motor World, which has a turnover of over £50 million, previously needed eyes in the back of its head to manage the emails of its 900 employees spread across 227 branches.

Although Motor World used a management company to look after its external email network, it was aware that there were issues internally, namely misuse of email by employees and a high volume of email traffic between its two main sites.

‘For six months we were continually having problems with the internet link that connects our two main sites at Bradford and Stratford upon Avon. The bandwidth was continually being sapped,’ says IT administrator Paul Oxley.

Having opted for Ireland-based Waterford Technologies’ MailMeter system, which costs approximately £10 per user, the company is now able to analyse email traffic being sent from its 150 mailboxes. The analysis includes the amount of non work-related emails being sent as well as information on how many emails are being stored internally, including the age and size of the emails. But it is non-invasive as it does not actually read the content of the emails but instead provides business reports on email attachments, headers and the domain names the emails are being sent and received from.

‘One issue we were able to address immediately was that virtually all the staff had ‘read receipt’ turned on in their Outlook and so were effectively sending out two emails each time,’ claims Oxley. ‘We also were able to track abuses. We picked up conversation threads through address pairing – some were as much as 300 emails a day!’

By using Mailmeter’s Return on Investment (ROI) calculator Green estimates that Motor World has made at least £20,000 in cost savings per year by eliminating such traffic. ‘We are now able to get best practice from our employees, especially with new recruits who are immediately made aware that we have installed the technology,’ he says.