The effort to develop this open, nonproprietary, plugand-play system using the Object Linking and Embedding for Process Control (OPC) standard had two goals. The first was to male lab-based research and development work on process monitoring and control directly and easily applicable to industrial plants. The second was to provide a standard method for individual process monitoring and process control software to interact and share data. This article describes the system's design and implementation. © 2005 IEEE.