Spanbild

Overview

Supported by a network of franchisees throughout New Zealand and Australia, Spanbild manufactures and delivers expertly-designed, quality steel, timber and paneled 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.

Challenge

For many prospective customers, their first contact with Spanbild is through the company website where they can view examples of building designs, learn more about the company’s offerings and manufacturing processes, distribution network and its community involvement.

Every month, the website's 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.

Franchisees began to query Spanbild regarding missing prospect information.

“Franchisees were ringing us up asking about 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.”
— Dwayne Johnson, Systems Administrator, Spanbild

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 delivered were being categorized as spam and, therefore, filtered out. Unfortunately, this included a large number of prospect inquiries. 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 criterion 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.”
— Symon Filet

Solution

The team reviewed a number of different options:

“Most were cloud solutions because they seemed to have better results and better guaranteed uptime. 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.”
— Dwayne Johnson

In late 2010, Spanbild selected Forcepoint Email Security to replace its existing system. The solution included standard encryption, anti-virus, anti-spam and email content filtering. The Forcepoint solution was deployed quickly without any issues.

“It was not a complex project, but we decided to use Forcepoint’s IT support to assist because it was the first time we had implemented this kind of solution.”
— Dwayne Johnson

Results

Now, whenever a suspect email arrives at Spanbild, Forcepoint automatically quarantines the email and sends an alert to the recipient to let them know what has happened. These simple steps ensure that emails are no longer lost. They also allow staff to review and appropriately deal with emails in a timely fashion.

“It is leading to lower false positive filtering on our emails, which means that any sales inquiries to our franchisees are not lost and this is providing us with more potential sales than in the past.”
— Dwayne Johnson

There are also efficiency advantages arising from the switch to Forcepoint, with the IT team discovering that it takes very little time to manage and administer the solution.

“Forcepoint is the primary anti-spam and email content filter for our organization. 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 Forcepoint, we have gone from a few false positives per week that we know of to zero.”
— Dwayne Johnson

Spanbild has relied on Forcepoint security solutions since 2010.