Vertical integration is an often used headline in the closed communication from office to machine level. The paper will give an overview of state-of-the-art, problems as well as opportunities of concept. Apart from a more general problem description, the paper also reports on results exemplarily in 3 industrial projects achieved by ARC Seibersdorf Research GmbH. The first example covers industrial measurement and testing automation - the most modern test stand for heat meter calibration set up for the PTB laboratories in Berlin. The second one shows the development of a full-automated casting plant for magnesium implementing the safety system. The last one is a highspeed coin sorting system for more than 1000 coin types consisting of control, visualisation, image processing and database.