The CIM 2001 Show Honours

Award winners at this year’s Computers in Manufacturing Show included document management software vendor Formscape Software, mechanical design software developer Solidworks, plant controls specialists Hawtal Whiting and WebKiosk and enterprise software vendor Sage Enterprise Solutions. Now in their seventh year, the awards were very well attended on the Wednesday evening, and are designed to acknowledge exhibitors in three key areas of business excellence. Prizes were on offer in the following areas: best advertising campaign in 2001, best stand at the CIM Show and best system or product (split further into three areas of manufacturing expertise: manufacturing business management, plant and factory controls and product engineering and development). Starting with the best product awards, the exhibitors were judged by a panel of analysts and consultants. Sitting on this year’s panel were: Dan Roberts, senior consultant with Cambashi and Simon Bragg, senior analyst with ARC, chaired by Brian Tinham, editor of MCS. Products were judged on their ability to demonstrate real business benefit and competitive advantage for manufacturing end users, with further points scored for innovation and novelty. In the manufacturing business management section, top honours went to Formscape Software, for its DocsOnline product. This software is a central document repository and directory that maintains documents that are created or managed by Formscape’s advanced content transformation system. Through a web browser, over intranet networks or the Internet, documents can be tracked, retrieved, displayed and delivered by staff, management, suppliers and customers. The product is ideally suited to companies whose manufacturing departments need to frequently view orders, plans and specifications or where dispersed teams require access to management and operational reports from disparate ERP, legacy and modern systems. Also highly commended in this section was infor:swan’s infor:Plastics product, a company-wide ERP software system developed specifically for the plastics and polymer manufacturing process. In the product engineering and development section, the panel gave top prize to Solidworks, for its eDrawings 2.0 product. The software is designed to break down incompatibility and design interpretation hurdles by allowing engineers and designers to easily create compressed electronic design files and e-mail these to colleagues. eDrawings’ small file size speeds the delivery of designs, eliminating the need for faxing or waiting for slow e-mails to arrive. Runner-up in this category was Visualistic, a design presentation software product that converts existing CAD designs from leading industry standard design packages and instantly turns them into interactive 3D, real time worlds. In the plant controls category, first prize went jointly to two companies, Hawtal Whiting and WebKiosk, for their VIA Touch (Visual Information Access) product. This touch screen kiosk system is an innovative method of disseminating process sheets, build instructions and other vital information to the shop floor. Operatives can see visualisations of the particular job or process and access animations showing the exact procedure for complex builds and access parts lists and torque wrench. Highly commended in the plant controls category was MCL Solutions for its Machine Shop Estimating software that includes modules for fabrication, general machining, turning and milling. Moving on to the other awards categories, the top prize for best advertising campaign in 2001 was judged by market research company, Benchmark Research. Guy Washer, md of the company, presented the first prize to infor:swan, but highly commended enterprise software vendor, Sage Enterprise Solutions, and third place went to food manufacturing software specialist, Ramesys. During the show on the MCS stand, visitors were given an opportunity to vote for their choice of best advert by completing a questionnaire while viewing the advertising entries. And finally, the award for best stand at the show, presented by Andrew Dedman, non-executive chairman of Penton Media Europe, was given to Sage Enterprise Solutions, with runners-up Mapics. The stands were judged on an exit poll basis, with visitors to the Show deciding the final result.