Management takes to the Internet
15 Jan 2000
At a recent joint event in Birmingham, key players in the manufacturing IT market demonstrated Internet and intranet solutions that they say will revolutionise business processes.
Intergraph, SAP, Siemens Automation, Microsoft and Digital held the `Internet enabled manufacturing' event as part of a European tour designed to illustrate that Internet technology is now moving `from being a pure marketing gimmick to a strategic tool providing real business benefits'. The solutions on show included Microsoft's BackOffice suite with Internet Explorer (394); SAP's R/3 Internet transaction server (395); Siemens's Simatic WinCC Scada system (396); and Intergraph's CAD/CAM and product data management packages (397).
Keeping pace with these big names are other companies such as Cimage (398) whose latest document management product, DM-Net v3.1, is a Java-based Internet/intranet package that allows documents to be added into - rather than merely read from - a document management system via standard browsers such as Explorer or Netscape Navigator. An obvious application area will be updates and revisions of engineering documents, completely remote from the design office.
Moving from document management to the larger issue of project management, Forgetrack (399) has just launched Webster for Primavera. Anyone with a web browser can now work interactively with Primavera Project Planner (P3). `Users can access project data from anywhere in the world,' says md Chris Loxley-Ford. `Webster gives interactive, real-time access to a project's complete database across corporate intranets or the Internet.
