CompassAir Automated Filing, Tagging & Colour Coding
Overview
Using rules that are more advanced and more powerful than Outlook, your incoming and outgoing emails are automatically filed and referenced, as soon as they arrive or are sent. Everyone with access to the mailbox will be able to access them with ease. What’s more, no time is wasted with manual sorting and filing with CompassAir making sure every single one is filed in the right place, ready to be actioned.
What does it do?
Once you have decided on a filing structure for your emails, CompassAir will look at each and every one of them as they are created, consider your instructions and then send them to the folder specified.
It will never miss an email and it will act as soon as an email lands in the inbox or is sent by a member of your team.
When you next look at your folders you can be sure they will be completely up to date, each one containing only those messages that should be there.
Again, using rules, messages can be tagged for example with the name of a ship or a yacht, or a keyword added such as “Singapore”, cutting the time and effort needed to retrieve them when needed at a later date.
If you still prefer to file messages manually, this can still be done using the familiar “drag and drop”. Keywords and names can be added in the same way, with messages being filed straight from your mobile phone or tablet.
What benefits does it bring?
With CompassAir automatically watching out for emails there is no room for human error, every single one will be filed exactly where you expect to find it, or tagged so that it can be found with a quick search when you need to read it.
By automating processes, CompassAir not only saves time and reduces the stress of “has it been done”, or “is it in the right place”, it also means your team will have more time to use productively rather than spend it on routine administrative activities.
How valuable is it?
Depending on the size of your team, you could be releasing a significant resource that can be put to better use elsewhere. This is especially the case when you are sending and receiving hundreds, even thousands of emails a day.
McKinsey found that we spend around 28% of our working week composing or responding to emails. Not only that, the mean recovery time from an email interruption is 64 seconds, and with an average of 87 emails a day, that amounts to around 7.5 hours a week wasted just getting back to what we were doing. On average we check our email 15 times a day. Therefore a great opportunity is available. Teams can make more productive use of their day knowing that CompassAir is organising their emails making their workflow more efficient, and then, when it is coupled with other features such as “NotifyMe”, some serious savings can be made.
With each of us receiving an average of 87 emails a day, the chance of missing one or more is significant. A typical operations or technical department will probably be receiving hundreds of emails daily – missing one could be catastrophic. By taking advantage of automated filing in conjunction with careful team delegation, this risk can be reduced significantly or even eliminated.
Probably, and despite not intending to, we read and re-read emails in a crowded inbox. By automatically filing them, where they can be dealt with efficiently, we can stop this duplication of effort. With the average professional having around 200 emails in their inbox, added to by the average 87 daily, and needing to respond to only 25%, here is another significant opportunity where resources can be re-directed to where they are really needed.
How is it used and what does it look like?
You can choose exactly how you want to deal with both incoming and outgoing emails using a comprehensive set of parameters. Using “Message Rules”, one first defines how each message is identified. In the example below one might choose to identify every email that contains in the text body the vessel name “Eclipse”.
Having told CompassAir to identify each email containing the name Eclipse, the next step is to define how it should deal with each email that satisfies that criterion.
As can be seen, there are many options available. Here we require CompassAir to notify the user of the email as soon as it appears, to add the keyword “Singapore” in order to facilitate future searches and to file it in the folder YACHTS/ECLIPSE/SINGAPORE. Not only that, we have chosen to file the message alongside Eclipse in the vessels database.
When organising how your documents will be filed there are a number of tools available that make this simple to do, including the ability to clone folder structures. For example, you may have a master folder showing the ship or yacht name, and under that need separate folders for legal agreements, crew information, associated revenue and expenditure documentation, and so on. If you have a fleet of 20 vessels and would like to use the same structure, you can copy the first, paste it then rename it, and each folder will be empty and ready to accomodate new documents.
Colour Coding of Emails
Another way to make it much easier to handle a high volume of daily emails is to make use of colour coding. Again, an automated procedure that, depending on how you choose to set it up, will enable you to see at a glance the general subject matter of emails, in what order of priority they need to be actioned, or possibly to which department they relate if you have access to multiple shared mailboxes.
In a similar way to when setting up filing and tagging above, this time colours can be associated with the characteristics of those emails to which you have access.
These can be single characteristics or a combination. For example, at it’s simplest you might choose to display those emails addressed to “Accounts” in green and “Sales” in blue. Selection criteria are numerous and include who sent the email, whether it is read or unread, is it a circular or has a member of your team taken responsibility for the email in question already.
As with all the other automated features you will find in CompassAir, once set up you just leave them to run on their own. As soon as an email arrives (or is sent), it is processed in the way you have chosen that best suits your way of working.
The colour coding of emails will be of value regardless of the sector in which you work. As an SnP Broker you will have many different deals in progress at the same time. Whilst that means there’s a huge number of emails to deal with every day, they probably tend to fall into just a few categories. For example, they might be related to finance, inspections, enquiries, purchases or sales.
By colour coding each category, when you scan the inbox it will be much easier to find what you need. For example, by coding initial enquiries blue you can easily see opportunities that need to be considered. Another way colour coding can be used is for setting priorities – red to indicate those emails that must be dealt with that day, green those not so urgent.
If you are a Ship Owner or Manager, those categories this time might be related to finance, maintenance, chartering and crewing, as well as buying and selling assets. For a Chartering Broker they could be enquiries, cargos, locations, vessels and owners.
