The fire service decided to sign up to CMIS in October 2014 and the system has been producing results ever since, as Alison Hughes, Committee and Member Services Manager explains: “We implemented CMIS in October 2014 and it has helped us a lot with our agenda production and the publishing of information to our website. It has really streamlined the way that we produce agendas; the process is now so much quicker. Prior to CMIS, we manually loaded everything into Adobe and it was a long and painful process to produce agendas. When we wanted to publish anything to the website, a different department would have to do that for us, making it a long chain in terms of getting to our end product.”

Alison explains, “When we were originally looking at implementing a system to help us with our committee administration, some were worried about what impact it would have on them and their jobs, but now they have seen the CMIS system working, they can see what a time-save it has been for them.”
“We have found that CMIS has saved us time in various ways, such as agenda production, publishing to the website and in areas like version control. We know now that our final version of a report or a minute is in CMIS, so we’re not spending time looking round the files trying to figure out whether it may have been adapted in some way. We have assurance that whatever is in CMIS is our final version.”

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."

The business process used to make policy decisions at Warwickshire County Council has been greatly improved thanks to CMIS Democratic Services software and a close working relationship between the council and the software provider, Astech Consultants Ltd.

In 2010, as part of its on-going pursuit of Good Governance, Warwickshire County Council undertook a review to find out if the council was making the best possible use of ICT. The project was led by the council’s Democratic Services Team in a programme of radical improvements to the decision making process aimed at achieving greater speed, consistency, accessibility and efficiency.
The review found that, for historical reasons, each of the nine directorates had their own process, resulting in serious inconsistency, confusion and waste. The Democratic Services team quickly agreed the improvements that were needed to unify and streamline the process and then produced a business case for purchasing a commercially available ICT system.
The resulting formal tendering process led to Warwickshire County Council choosing Astech to provide a tailored solution to suit the council’s requirements, on the basis of the outstanding flexibility of the CMIS software. Jane Pollard, Warwickshire CC’s Democratic Services Manager, said the decision to implement CMIS was an easy one.
“CMIS is the only product on the market that could truly automate our business processes. The flexible approach of the Astech team and the commitment to evolve the product continually made the decision easy for us.”

The CMIS suite of Democratic Management modules has provided the council with a software application capable of delivering the workflow control and functionality it required. At the heart of the applications is a streamlined, error free process that:

• is designed to match WCC’s needs precisely
• simplifies the creation of proposals and reports
• creates reports, agendas and minutes
• proceeds on an intuitive, logical, step-by-step basis
• automates many historically manual proceduressuch as document distribution, consultation, collection of comments and approvals
• enables visual tracking of progress so giving the author full control and allowing other parties to check the stage of a job
• uses reminders to keep all interested parties to an agreed timetable speeds up and simplifies consultation and decision making
• significantly reduces costs

Additionally, the web-based nature of the CMIS system allows council officers remote access and flexible working from any computer, anywhere.
The package from CMIS includes comprehensive technical support and training, as required.

In their first year of using CMIS, Warwickshire County Council were able to save over £10,000 a month following a vast reduction in paper usage, distribution costs and an increase in productivity.

In Warwickshire County Council’s own words, “The electronic preparation, consultation and distribution of reports and agendas has also resulted in considerable savings in printing and distribution costs.” Officers’ time previously spent administering the process is now diverted to other duties with resultant savings in all the council’s directorates.

As a Metropolitan Fire Brigade it functions under the control of the West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority. Formed in 1986, the Authority is made up of 27 elected
members from the 3 cities and 4 districts in the area. The brigade is run under the command of the chief fire officer and his principal command team and provides emergency response from 39 fire stations across the region. The vision of the fire service is to “make the West Midlands safer” by offering a quality service aimed at preventing, protecting and responding.

Problem

The effective administration and management of day to day committee management processes was proving an increasingly time-consuming activity for the Authority. This was exacerbated by the need to keep committee members, drawn from a large geographical area, informed. Straight forward tasks such as providing information relating to members meetings and distributing the associated documents were taking an excessive amount of time and resource to fulfil. With these requirements in mind the Authority decided to look for a proven committee management system that:

• Contributed towards more efficient document management
• Gave access to all officers, members and the public
• Reduced printing costs by minimising the number of hard copies produced
• Minimised the time the committee services staff spent retrieving old or archived documents for other departments

Additional requirements were placed on the Authority by BVPI 157. This sets specific targets for the electronic provision of services, a key part of which is the obligation to publish committee papers for public consumption via the Internet. As this was a procedure the Authority was already following this feature was an important requirement of any chosen solution.

Solution 

Sandwell MBC, the Fire Authority’s lead authority, had been successfully utilising CMIS for a number of years. Based on Sandwell’s recommendation the Fire Authority invited CMIS to outline how they would tailor the solution to deal with the requirements of a single-purpose authority. Once they were satisfied with the proposals they opted to implement CMIS.

CMIS was specifically designed to address the needs for committee and member services staff to be able to manage more effectively the democratic process and framework. Specifically, it allows members, officers and citizens to search for and find minute, report, agenda or resolution information from meetings via the Internet and any browser enabled device. CMIS enables committee and member services staff to more effectively manage the democratic process and framework, including current legislation. While members and citizens can access information from home, work or any public access point such as a kiosk or local library.

The system is totally secure with parameters and the availability of documents being controlled by Authority staff.
CMIS is now used by a number of authorities to help achieve e-Government targets. For the West Midlands Fire Authority the standard CMIS product was modified to cater specifically for the needs of a single-purpose authority.

Benefits

The introduction of CMIS has allowed all of the Authority’s decision-making documentation (agendas, reports and records of decisions) to be made accessible across the
Internet. A standardised publishing format coupled with an easy-to-use Web-based interface means that information can now be easily accessed by committee services staff, members and citizens irrespective of their location.
Decision making within the Authority is more transparent as members’ history, attendance and political affiliation, together with their other committee memberships can be quickly accessed via the Website. This is important with regard the Authority meeting the central government targets for e-government. Processing and scheduling Authority meetings is now much easier due to CMIS’ inbuilt fully automated e-mail functionality, making the task of informing members about new or rescheduled meetings less time consuming.
Centralising information storage to one location and IT system has made it easier to share information both internally and publicly. It has also made the security and
backup of data easier to coordinate and manage. This has also helped to save on storage space for committee services staff and members.
CMIS has also provided the potential to make savings in printing budgets. The ability to dispatch agenda and reports electronically can minimise the number of hard copies produced and help the Authority become more sustainable in the future.