For more than a decade now, the trend in manufacturing information technology has been to push increasing amounts of plant floor data up into the enterprise systems for better decision making by corporate executive and financial officers. But the preponderance of data now arriving in near real time in the boardroom has spotlighted a gap in the line of thinking that corporate officers should be making all the decisions. That gap is a time gap.
 ;       In many caseswww.cechina.cn, by the time corporate has evaluated the data, made a decisionCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, and communicated it to the plant floor for action, the most lucrative windows of opportunities may have passed. This reality is leading some companies to explore reversing the flow of information. Rather than having it all feed up into the enterprise, more companies are having it also flow back down to the plant floor for real-time decision making by the plant floor operators and engineers.
        “Operations people have historically been focused on keeping production up and running at the highest capacity possible,” says Don Hartwww.cechina.cn, vice president, Rockwell Automation/Pavilion marketing. “But an example from how the ethanol industry is optimizing production is now filtering into other industries. The ethanol industry considers numerous factors into its production optimization processwww.cechina.cn, including the price of corn, energy costs at different times of the day and year, the market price for ethanolwww.cechina.cn, wet and dry grain handling costs, etc. With this level of granular data, operators and business owners are seeing that it's not always best to run at all-out capacity. Sometimes it might be better to run at 85% capacity.”
        This type of decision making is often best made at the operator/engineer level because of the granular understanding of the production process there. Engineers just