Manufacturing is nowadays experiencing a transition that is fostering new opportunities and issues in the control engineering field. Emerging new approaches are enabled by Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) technologies and methods. The smart, sensing, and sustainable enterprise (S^3 Enterprise) is a digital business innovation concept building on technologies like IIoT and CPS for aggregating data from and to intelligent sensors and actors. Agent-based Middleware, Message-based Middleware, Service-oriented Architectures are key technologies that promote the structuring and organisation of distributed systems. New AI- and model-driven approaches enhance the support to the human decision makers, enabling agile, flexible, and proactive management of the enterprise. The S^3 Enterprise requires new capabilities enabled by next-generation information systems to perform sensing, modelling, analysis, and interpretation of “any” signal, with real-time data gathering and analysis and/or with offline historical data series elaboration. The data and intelligent algorithms support flexible, and autonomous adaptation of the enterprise to the changing needs of the business and socio-technical context. The special section of this issue of Annual Reviews in Control, is composed of extended versions of 6 selected best papers published in open invited tracks of the IFAC TC 5.1 “Manufacturing Plant Control” and the TC 5.3 “Integration and Interoperability of Enterprise Systems” at the IFAC World Congress 2020, Berlin.