August 11, 1997

Document-Management Deals Corporate users seek easier access By Karen M. Carrillo ompanies looking for better ways to organize, find, and share information are turning to document-management systems that access data on corporate intranets. Highlighting this trend, several corporate users inked deals last month with top document-management vendors. Whirlpool Corp. plans to deploy 1,000 seats of Documentum Inc.'s Enterprise Document Management System to help its customer service and sales departments better manage product specifications and market information. "The biggest reason we chose Documentum was because the user interface was the friendliest from a business standpoint," says Diana Seaman, senior project manager at Whirlpool, in Benton Harbor, Mi ch. EDMS lets users access and update documents via a Web browser or Documentum's client software. Whirlpool will launch a pilot project in September with 15% of its employees. It expects the EDMS system to be fully deployed by the second half of 1998. Seaman wouldn't say how much the deployment would cost. Officials at Documentum, in Pleasanton, Calif., say implementations average $300 to $400 per seat for large enterprise deals. Lockheed Martin Energy Systems is also using Documentum's EDMS and RightSite, a Web server that serves as the back end to Documentum's system across five of its sites, to manage the creation, approval, and distribution of documents concerning environmental cleanup. Documentum's WorkSpace software also provides document-management services to users who create and define the business policies or coordinate the document processes. There will be 150 users of the WorkSpace software once it is deployed by the end of September. With EDMS, Lockheed says it has saved approxim ately $250,000 in personnel costs. "The next phase is to provide the public with information they normally go to get in reading rooms by the end of next year," says Stacie Burnham, information-management specialist at Lockheed Martin, in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Procter & Gamble Co. in Cincinnati will use Lotus Development Corp.'s Domino.doc document-management software as part of its planned deployment of 80,000 seats of Lotus Notes and Domino. Lotus officials estimate that the low cost of Domino.doc will draw business from large corporate customers. The uniprocessor server is available for $4,275 and can service between 100 and 500 users, depending on usage. "We're aiming at enterprisewide deployment," says Nigel Elkan, director of marketing and sales at Lotus, in Cambridge, Mass. Analysts say the Internet is starting to have more of an impact on document management. International Data Corp., a market research firm in Framingham, Mass., forecasts the document-management industry to grow from $276.9 million in 1996 to $1.5 billion in 2001. American President Lines Ltd. is rolling out FileNet's WebSeries software for retrieving purged mainframe data and sending documents over the intranet. "The turn time is between 15 and 30 minutes," says Loretta Goralczyk, imaging manager at the international shipping company in Oakland, Calif. "Before, it took two weeks." Approximately 1,000 employees will use the software in APL's customer service, credit, and collections departments to view billing information. Customer service representatives can view information on payment, commodities, port data, and more. Previously, representatives would have to retrieve information from microfiche. WebSeries software is priced at $25,000 per server. Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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