Frank Baxter, Transport Policy Manager of Southampton City Council says it was time to change, and believes the investment affirms the organisation’s commitment to improving transport services across the region, by engaging more effectively with the local community.

“These solutions are used to streamline the onerous task of creating complex strategy documents that require collaboration between multiple contributors and then have to be put out to public consultation. The entire process is managed from the initial draft right through to publishing the final documents, providing us with a coordinated approach to allocate workload and tasks better across the three organisations.”

Simon Etherington, UK General Manager of Objective Corporation, believes the councils were attracted by the solution’s capability to manage the end to end creation of the LTP3: “There are growing pressures on public sector organisations to work together to deliver better services, at lower cost to their local communities. Our solutions are designed to help government bodies to connect more effectively and achieve these objectives. In this case, we are providing a secure, online environment for people from three different councils to collaborate together on their future transport plans for the region.”

Objective offers web-based integrated collaboration and publishing solutions with robust document creation facilities including customisable shared workspaces and one-click publishing to multiple channels. This enables organisations to easily and cost-effectively produce complex branded and professional documents, and content-rich microsites and portals.

Frank concluded: “As the only solutions on the market capable of satisfying all these requirements, we selected Objective to manage the creation of our LTP3. Unlike when producing the LTP2, we can now concentrate on the quality of content, rather than worrying about the physical process of creating the documentation to support the plans.

We were also concerned how we were going to manage the new consultation requirements, however with this solution; we have an integrated method that efficiently collects feedback from the 1.6m residents in our region.”