Modern production environments require integrated views on different processes (manufacturing, logistics) at different levels to enable analysis and optimization of these processes. The views can be provided by cockpits allowing the insights for different responsible persons. The purpose of the EU-funded project PLANTCockpit is to develop a general approach for creating of such cockpits for different industries and application scenarios. One aspect of this is the development of the corresponding cockpit architecture enabling generic access on different information systems, flexible analysis and visualization of the information as well as easy user-and application-specific configuration. This paper presents the main requirements on and principles of such architecture, including different layers of the architecture as well as flexible data and control workflow based on the unified messaging. At the end, the architecture is validated by applying on two application scenarios of energy monitoring and asset optimization.