Collaborative content management suite set to speed manufacturing and business processes

Increased productivity throughout manufacturing business functions, from new product development, through supplier relationship management and purchasing, to change control and even aspects of product lifecycle management are the promise of new multi-platform ‘collaborative content management’ software from developer iManage. iManage’s WorkSite MP (multi-platform) is being claimed as the first software suite to combine document management, web-based collaboration support, workflow and portal access – all in a single, integrated Java-based package that operates seamlessly across all of Windows NT, Linux and Solaris platforms. The company, which cut its teeth in the legal and financial services sectors, but has recently made sales into global manufacturing and engineering firms, makes the point that in today’s world of heterogeneous IT systems internally and externally, several issues get in the way of efficiency through knowledge sharing. One is the disparate IT systems themselves; another is departmental and company boundaries; and there’s information and email overload, particularly with unstructured content. Additionally, unstructured content is often stored in network servers, desktop computers, laptop hard-drives and email folders, where it is difficult to share and re-use, not to mention prone to loss. Companies seeking to manage this have, until now, been constrained by the lack of a comprehensive, multi-platform solution. WorkSite MP deals with all this and streamlines organisational administration by facilitating enterprise-wide deployment of content and collaboration capabilities across disparate computing environments. Says Dan Carmel, vice president of marketing and business development for iManage: “Most companies have invested in Internet infrastructure to deliver broadband connectivity to employees’ desktops. iManage WorkSite MP is the first application to truly leverage this infrastructure to change the way people work. “We developed a next-generation solution that builds on a foundation of collaborative content management that is already successfully in place today with over 1,000 of our customers and 400,000 WorkSite users.” Content can include anything from shopfloor layouts, to BoMs (bills of materials), engineering documents, project management charts, component pricing, engineering costing data, engineering revisions, contract data, product launch plans and so on. And the environment itself is configurable either by the users and/or with help from iManage’s professional services team and implementation partners. Carmel says the system lends itself to all sorts of applications involving aspects of collaboration. He cites supplier relationship management and regulatory and quality management, and bid management, all involving freeform documents and information sharing. Then there’s new product development, introduction and manufacturing – all of which can be speeded up through information and project status data sharing in appropriate formats for those involved. Vanasse Hangen Brustlin (VHB), an engineering, planning and applied sciences consulting firm, is among the first to evaluate the suite for its 750 employee, 14 office organisation. Says Greg Bosworth, IT operations manager: “We see its great potential for facilitating work sharing among employees in our different offices, sub-consultants and our clients. “It is flexible enough to handle the business content we work with as well as being compatible with the environment. Our vision is to use this product to bring all the members of our extended enterprise-and their business content-into a single, efficient collaborative environment, regardless of geographical or technical boundaries.” In brief detail, the suite components are: WorkDocs MP, WorkTeam MP, WorkPortal MP and WorkRoute MP. WorkDocs is the web-based document management system that lets employees capture, organise, store, publish and review versions of documents stored in repositories distributed around an extended enterprise. Then WorkTeam provides geographically dispersed teams with ‘virtual work spaces’, accessible via Internet, intranet, or extranet, to discuss, collaborate review faster and more efficiently in virtually any role. WorkRoute is the workflow application that streamlines your business processes across and within companies, easing but structuring the review, approval and publishing stages. And WorkPortal is the portal software, which provides each member of an extended enterprise with a secure and consolidated view of content relevant to them from anywhere and anything. iManage WorkSite MP starts at $70,000 for 100 users.