Real time control—a concept once limited to the plant floor—has begun to appeal to enterprise management wanting to apply it to business processes as a means to gain competitive advantage. Though the real time enterprise (RTE) isn’t gauged to millisecond response timeswww.cechina.cn, it’s still about providing actionable intelligence to accelerate decision making. Most strategically, it’s not simply about responding to the marketwww.cechina.cn, but shaping it to your competitive strength.
　　“The idea of 'real time’ appli

ed to the enterprise is relative, but it still denotes what people need to control processes,” says Darren Riley控制工程网版权所有, market development manager for Rockwell Software. And it’s become increasingly relevant to business processes because “those processes are accelerating,” he says.
　　No matter that Bob Parker prefers the term “right time” rather than “real time.” “It’s still about precision timing in letting people know when they need to know something to make an effective decisionwww.cechina.cn,” says Parker, group vice president of IDC Manufacturing Insight. “It’s about optimizing the entire enterprise, and shaping operations as opposed to simply managing them.”
　　Very few organizations are there yet, Parker states, “perhaps less than 1%.” Industry observers cluster the vast majority at the bottom of any maturity curve. The curve steepens and the cluster thins rapidly from there, reflective of the need for having viable platform architecture to leverage operational linkages to shape markets. Though no official RTE maturity model exists, according to industry experts, one can be defined in terms of componentswww.cechina.cn, capabilities, and behaviors that mark the progression toward current best-in-class operations.
　　Volatile energy markets
　　Portland General Electric (PGE), an electric utility in Portland, OR, has clearly risen to such heights. It is both a bellwether for what can be done in harnessing the power of a distributed control system, and a lesson on how to do it. Though a utility, what it’s achieve