Just as the express train is faster than the local, and taking an elevator is quicker than climbing stairs, several new methods and tools are shortening and speeding up trips between plant-floor process applications and their enterprise levels—often with help from cloud-based services. Formerly separate software and programming areas that divided these functional realms and required multiple steps to travel from one to the other are steadily consolidating and enabling even small process control applications to benefit from closer ties with their upper levels, just as their larger counterparts do. For instance, Coca-Cola Refreshments in Atlanta has been using GE…
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