“The general rule-of-thumb I’m seeing is this: ‘Capital spending is bad,’ ” says Neil Cooper, general manager of manufacturing and business operations for controls vendor Invensys Process Systems (www.ips.invensys.com), Plano, Texas.

 “It is as if a baseball manager tried to manage using only the team batting average, rather than those of each individual player.” This is the way Peter Martin, vice president and general manager of performance management at Invensys Process Systems, Foxboro, Mass., describes the difficulty plant operations personnel have in figuring out when specific operations are profitable, and when their profitability has begun to slip.

 It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. Do you know where your support manuals are?

 Successful manufacturers rely on a real-time execution model that dramatically increases the requirement for continuous availability of vital information technology business applications.

 In the beginning, there was the flow chart. This simple diagram provided the basic tool to manage and execute a business project.