The Power of Real Time Intelligence

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 times, it's still about providing actionable intelligence to accelerate decision making. Most strategically, it's not simply about responding to the market, but shaping it to your competitive strength. 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 decision, 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%. Though no official RTE maturity model exists, according to industry experts, one can be defined in terms of components, capabilities, and behaviors that mark the progression toward current best-in-class operations.