The creation of a simple application to maintain state or a view of where in a particular process flow a particular transaction has reached.
This is possible in a mature distributed architecture where several applications support the end to end business process; for example a sample being received from an external source, being processed on a specific instrument, the resulting sequence being generated and available for analysis and the final report of results being published.
If there is sufficient meta-data available from the message data to identify a particular transaction from start to finish, it's current state can be monitored in this application with state being updated as messages flow between applications.