Industry: Manufacturing
Location: New Zealand & Australia
Products Used: Hosted Email Security
Spanbild is a market leader in the design, manufacture and building of residential, rural and commercial buildings
Supported by a network of franchisees throughout New Zealand and Australia, Spanbild manufactures and delivers expertly designed, quality steel, timber and panelled temporary, permanent and relocatable buildings to suit a range of applications and environments. Its buildings can be found throughout the rural, lifestyle, residential, commercial, educational and public sectors.
Lost emails
For many prospective customers, their first contact with Spanbild is through the company website (www.spanbild.com), where they can view examples of building designs, learn more about the company's offerings, its manufacturing processes, distribution network and its community involvement.
Every month the website contacts page generates a significant volume of queries from prospects seeking information and quotes. These are automatically directed by the email server to the appropriate franchisee for follow-up.
Approximately 20 months ago franchisees began to query Spanbild regarding missing prospect information. Dwayne Johnson, Systems Administrator at Spanbild explains: "Franchisees were ringing us up asking after prospective customers that they knew had visited and registered interest on our website. They were getting concerned that information was being lost or not getting through."
Spanbild's IT team investigated and discovered that the company's email security system was identifying a large number of false positives. Emails that should have been getting through were being categorised as spam and therefore, filtered out. Unfortunately this included a large number of prospect enquiries. At the same time, they noticed that the email security software was running out of hard disk drive space.
The potential impact of lost emails was a real concern to Spanbild management so the company decided to replace its email filtering system. Symon Filet, Information Systems Manager adds, "We wanted a more robust system that had a proven track record. Our biggest selection criteria was a solution that provided the lowest number of false positives and a very high uptime due to email being so crucial to our business."
A cloud-based solution
The team reviewed a number of different options. "Most were cloud solutions because they seemed to have better results and better guaranteed uptime," Johnson notes. "What it came down to was which solution offered the best value for money and had the best uptime. We needed a system that would run 99.9 percent of the time."
In late 2010, Spanbild selected Websense Hosted Email Security to replace its existing system. The solution included standard encryption, anti-virus, anti-spam and email content filtering. Working with the company's Tier 3 IT support provider, Gen-I, the Websense solution was deployed quickly without any issues. "It wasn't a complex project but we decided to use Gen-i to assist because it was the first time we had implemented a cloud solution," Johnson says.
The difference in process
Now, whenever a suspect email arrives at Spanbild, Websense automatically quarantines the email and sends an alert to the recipient to let them know what's happened. These simple steps ensure that that emails are no longer lost. They also allow staff to review and appropriately deal with emails in a timely fashion. Johnson points out, "It's leading to lower false positive filtering on our emails which means that any sales enquiries to our franchisees are not lost and this is providing us with more potential sales than in the past.
There are also efficiency advantages arising from the switch to Websense, with the IT team discovering that it takes very little time to manage and administer the solution.
"Websense is the primary anti-spam and email content filter for our organisation. Due to the nature of our business, email communication is very important and our IT strategy places a large focus on ensuring that this communication is provided to our franchisees with the least possible problems. With Websense we've gone from a few false/positives per week that we know of to zero," Johnson concludes.
English (US)