Putting blueprints on your intranet

Does your business have a manufacturing component? If so, you know that revisions are inevitable during the course of a project. Since more than one person at your company needs to see those drawings, different people may end up with different versions—as long as the process is paper-based.

But now, with intranet software, everyone can work from the same set of documents. "The intranet is used to facilitate exchange of design data among different groups, not just Engineering," notes Erik Keller, an analyst at Gartner Group, Inc. "In the past, this was always too hard or expensive or both. But this technology makes it easy. People can go into the Web site and look up the latest version of a product."

Welcome to modern distribution and manufacturing, where automation, efficiencies and, increasingly, communications are setting the path to the future—with intranets as a principal strategic asset. Of the 125 manufacturers recently surveyed by Boston consultants Advanced Manufacturing Research, Inc., 65% said they have built corporate intranets. An additional 28% said they would have intranets up and running within the next year.

Putting computer-aided design/manufacturing (CAD/CAM) designs and applications where employees can view and even amend them at all stages of the process improves efficiency and ensures that everyone is looking at the same version of the plan.