Portsmouth City Council

Portsmouth City Council makes £1.6M in annual savings

In 2014, Portsmouth City Council’s busy communications and marketing team researched options to find valuable savings for the council and create a more streamlined and efficient workflow. Their aim was to cut out unnecessary work, ensure best value and provide a consistently effective and strategic communications service for the whole council and a number of local partners.

They chose Panacea Software to:

Create a simple shared workflow to save time and simplify processes
Allow officers throughout the council to “self-serve” where appropriate
Record, monitor and charge for time worked on design
Maintain a shared archive, record and audit trail for all their work
Manage all expenditure on advertising, print, photography and related services
Maintain a Dynamic Purchasing System for the council’s advertising spend
Provide real-time management information across all their work
Automate time-consuming transactions like internal charging, client invoicing and supplier payments

Request

Approve

Fulfil

Pay

Report

Using Panacea Software, the corporate communications and marketing department and their integral design team has created a fully integrated, secure online tool, with which they continue to deliver a highly valued service and substantial cost benefits to officers and business units across the whole council.

For us, the most significant benefit of Panacea is the cost savings to date: since introducing central co-ordination, the council has reduced spend on print and advertising from (an estimated) £1.6 million in 2012 to £250,000 in 2015/16. Our objective from now on is to maintain annual spending at this level and find iterative savings where we can. We’re confident that the move towards quotation automation on routine and
digital printing will deliver this. Ultimately, we want to deliver more proactive, targeted and relevant communications to our residents – and Panacea will work alongside other initiatives, like improving the website and implementing email marketing, to deliver this.

The benefit of visibility and central decision-making also cannot be overstated. At Portsmouth City Council, we have a centralised marketing and communications team – in the past it has been difficult to maintain an oversight of the marketing, advertising and print activity of the services we support. By providing a platform through which all jobs are approved centrally, it enables our communications and marketing specialists to advise services on how to get the best results for their budget – as well as being a valuable tool for monitoring brand guideline adherence, artwork version control and proof approval.

— Lucy Elliott, Marketing Manager, Portsmouth City Council