Electronic Data Management is the fast growth area in computer-aided manufacturing, it is a $1,200m market globally of which UK invested over $28m or so says CIMdata Ltd, computer-aided design consultants. The reasons behind this growth are threefold says CIMdata. Firstly, manufacturers are becoming more reliant on design software mainly because it speeds up time to market. Secondly, design software is becoming more specialised and each package can carry out only a limited degree of design within the whole life cycle of the product. And manufacturers are moving away from proprietary systems to client-server and are therefore running Unix and Windows packages. Manufacturers need to track all this data and also access it quickly, enter electronic data management. Electronic data management should enable companies to distribute documents to all users and manage information accross the enterprise. According to CIMdata the global market for electronic data management products is fragmented with US design software developers Computervision Ltd and Sherpa Corp having the largest share with 15% each. Sherpa’s data management product, Vision Sherpa/PIMS, is a client-server product designed to provide central storage for all product information, company-wide communication about the product’s status and a framework for controlling changes to the product from concept to shipment. Computervision’s equivalent is Electronic Data Management, or EDM, also a client-server system which provides an interface to access, track, sort and retrieve CAD files, word processing files and spreadsheet programs. Another players in the document management field is Documentum Inc. The Pleasanton, California document management company believes it can steal a march over rivals in this field because its document management product is not proprietary. Documentum is working towards open standard for electronic document management through the standards groups ODMA, the Open Document Management Association, and DEN, Document-Enabled Ne tworking. ODMA members include Oracle Corp, Novell Inc and Autodesk Inc. Oracle and Novell are also members of the Document Enabled Networking group along with Xerox Corp and AT&T Global Information Solutions.
