Every process plant is under pressure to improve its financial performance. As employees are empowered to do more with less, the key to success is instant availability of information across the enterprise. Quality assurance has to confirm that each product is meeting the design requirements.
Maintenance wants to know when the line is down and why.
Production management wants to monitor and detect problems before they lead to wasted materials. Accounting needs to calculate the costs of each production run. The boss just wants security that everything is working as planned. They all need access to specific operational information in your process system right now . Forget about asking an already overburdened IT department to create a new application or two.