Collaboration offers better ways to manage

Standardisation, consistency and collaboration are rising rapidly up today’s business watchwords list as companies respond to the increasing dictates of regulatory compliance and more efficient and flexible operations. One IT firm that saw the requirement coming is Ascot-based interwoven, which, until a few years ago, was building and integrating web sites. Now its common denominator is ‘collaborative environments’ – aimed at everything from project management to content provisioning and digital asset management. Miles Kelly, director of marketing, says its Worksite collaborative project system – now one of its premier solutions for manufacturers – gives the idea. “It gives users a collaborative manufacturing experience, even over multi-year projects covering multiple geographies. We provide a centralised repository to manage document- and process-centric issues, handling PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and emails. Instead of emailing attachments point-to-point, users all work in the environment.” His view: the system is finding appeal because of the “overwhelming trend towards standardisation of processes – breaking bottlenecks and focusing on regulatory and compliance coverage.” Interwoven’s other offerings are its Content Provisioning Solution, which can manage ERP systems, for example, on distributed networks – ensuring that updates and upgrades happening a standard and consistent manner. Beyond that it offers Teamsite for web content management, and MediaBin for digital marketing collateral management.