Process management serves as a central mechanism for supporting collaborative design and manufacturing. In this paper, a Java-based, distributed process management system for collaborative design and manufacturing is presented. The system called MIDAS employs the process grammar to support the efficient representation of process alternatives and to facilitate the collaboration among users. The main features of our system are: Java-based, distributed architecture, and XML-based. Java applets and RMI increase the portability of our system, enabling the client-side module of our system to run at any location without the pre-installation of additional software. Process databases, servers, and external applications that are distributed over various companies can be integrated into the system transparently to users. XML is utilized to represent the execution status, data visualization, and task knowledge, increasing the scalability and customizability of the system functionalities. The system is shown to be efficient when we applied it to several real processes.