Essex County Council
CMIS Agenda builder - overview...
CMIS Agenda Builder saves organisations thousands of pounds on printing costs, hours spent juggling Word documents, and makes digital-by-default a reality for CMIS users.
CMIS Agenda Builder has helped Essex County Council take the vital first step towards ‘digital by default’ council meetings, moving the mountains of paperwork they email online, saving thousands of pounds a year on printing costs and many, many hours of officers’ time.
CMIS Agenda Builder automatically compiles everything you need for a meeting into a single pack and distributes it digitally to anyone who needs a copy. You can update the pack in minutes any time there’s a change, and quickly publish it to your website for members of the public to access.
Building an agenda and pack is easy. Add the items to be discussed, then upload any associated documents and reports. Drag and drop to quickly arrange everything in the order you want. CMIS then compiles everything into a single, professional document pack, with the agenda and all the documents needed, all in the right order and properly numbered to match the agenda whilst respecting any security associated with the document.
All distribution can be handled by email, including sending the agenda and pack out for comments and approval, and distributing it to members and officers. CMIS will even publish it to your website and to the MyCMIS mobile app. Once done, if anything changes it just takes a few minutes to update it and send out the new version.
Agenda Builder can be adopted with only minimal changes to your current workflow and processes, so you can start saving time and money right away. You will see many more benefits when you use it alongside CMIS’ powerful workflow and decision management tools, enabling CMIS to automatically suggest agenda items and import reports for you. But, thanks to CMIS’ flexible, modular design, you can just adopt those parts of the system which suit you.
Although Agenda Builder is just one module of CMIS, it’s successful introduction has already brought about considerable savings/compiling an agenda pack and in printing costs. We spend at least 50% less time preparing our agendas. In an average month that could equate to anything up to 20 hours saved.
We have markedly reduced our printing costs. By circulating the agenda pack by email to recipients and making better use of IT we have estimated that Agenda Builder alone is worth savings of more that £7,000 per annum. Once we also deploy to members and achieve a truly paperless environment we expect further savings representing several times this figure.
CMIS Agenda Builder has helped Essex County Council take the vital first step towards ‘digital by default’ council meetings, moving the mountains of paperwork they email online, saving thousands of pounds a year on printing costs and many, many hours of officers’ time.
Choosing CMIS...
CMIS Agenda builder...
Less time, lower costs happier members...
Essex have been using CMIS since 2010 when they decided to replace an old system developed in-house with modern e-democracy software. Being used to a custom solution, they liked the fact that CMIS could be customised around their own workflows and processes, unlike other off the shelf systems which take more of a one size fits all approach.
By opting for a hosted solution, they also avoided the expensive infrastructure and support costs of installed software, while still getting a flexible solution that was adapted to their needs.
Essex have integrated CMIS seamlessly with their website, making it easy for anyone to access information on elected members, elections, meetings, decisions and outside bodies. As well as council meetings and agenda items, and a political history of each member, the Astech team helped import older information into the system, creating a searchable document archive going back over 10 years – all accessible to officers, members and the public alike.
The switchover has been made even easier by the support Astech provide to their clients:
“The help and support from Astech can’t be faulted,” says Ian Myers, senior committee officer at Essex County Council. “If there’s ever a query you just pick up the phone, they’ve come and spent time with us going through the software, they couldn’t have been better.”
With the core system in place, Essex began looking at what other time and cost savings they could make with CMIS. Astech suggested they start with Agenda Builder, which compiles meeting agendas and reports, and distributes them digitally to whoever needs them.
Council meetings involve a lot of paperwork. For every item on the agenda supporting documents need to be produced, reports written, and all of them compiled together into a ‘pack’ for attendees to refer to. This normally involves juggling multiple word documents, keeping track of information from multiple sources, and then printing many copies of many documents for distribution to members, officers, local MP’s and members of the public. The printing costs alone can be huge, let alone the time spent collating all the documents, and then re-compiling and re-ordering them every time the agenda changes.
With the CMIS agenda builder, the democratic services team can quickly produce even quite complicated agenda packs, update them in minutes, and distribute them by email to anyone who wants a copy. They just upload the relevant documents, associate each one with a particular agenda item, and then CMIS does the hard work of collating them all into a single document.
Everything ends up in the right order, with numbered pages and agenda items, watermarks and spacing pages for double-sided printing, CMIS’ simple drag ‘n’ drop interface makes it easy to reorder an agenda and then regenerate the pack, with all the information updated to match the new agenda order. Finally, distribution lists for each committee makes sure everyone who needs a copy of the agenda pack gets a copy and is notified if anything changes.
For now, members still get a printed version of the pack. But everyone else, from the council officers to local MP’s, just gets an email and then accesses the pack online. The transition has been an easy one, and has already led to real savings. Members and officers really value the new, more professional packs, which make finding relevant reports and information in meetings much quicker, and the democratic services team have freed up time to spend on more valuable tasks.
“Although Agenda Builder is just one module of CMIS, its successful introduction has already brought about considerable savings/compiling an agenda pack and printing costs.
We spend at least 50% less time preparing our agendas, in an average month that could equate to anything up to 20 hours saved.
We have markedly reduced our printing costs. By circulating the agenda packs by email to recipients and making better use of IT we have estimated that Agenda Builder alone is worth savings of more than £7,000 per annum. Once we also deploy members and achieve a truly paperless environment we expect further savings representing several times this figure.”