Cott Corporation is the world's leading supplier of store-brand soft drinks and juices, with beverage manufacturing facilities in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom and a concentrate production plant and research and development center in Columbus, Georgia. Like other companies in its industry, Cott is under pressure to bring out new products very quickly.

          Cott had been using e-mail to route product approval forms with details such as a new product's flavor formula or the artwork for a bottle label to managers of various groups involved in the product development process. Difficulties controlling this unstructured information delayed efforts to get new soda and juice products onto store shelves. Because of time lags in routing e-mail from one person to another, it took an average of 60 days for a form to obtain all the necessary approvals. People would begin various production activities before the approval was finalized in order to avoid delaying production of new beverages. But changes were inevitably required. The art department might start working on a product label based on an approval form and later learn that they needed to modify the design because of a change in equipment that affected the label's dimensions. Production of the new product might be moved to a different plant. As CIO Douglas Neary observed, "This was a major business problem that needed to be solved."

          Cott solved this problem by adopting Documentum eRoom software to manage product approval forms. The software enables employees to set up online project work spaces to create and share documents. The documents are preserved in a company-wide document repository where they can be easily shared and accessed by everyone working on a new product. Each time a new product order triggers the creation of a new product approval form, the system sets up a work space for that product. Managers of various groups involved in product development can track the form, view any changes to the form, and work jointly with others on changes that affect multiple areas of production. By managing product approval information more effectively, Cott's product approval process takes only two to three days and production is much more efficient.

Sources: Tony Kontzer, "Content Overload," Information Week, January 19, 2004; "New Product Development," www.documentum.com, accessed June 12, 2004; and www.cott.com, accessed June 12, 2004.