Siemens FactoryLink monitors, supervises, and controls industrial processes by enabling customers to perfect their processes and products. Built on an advanced open architecture, FactoryLink delivers the highest performance and flexibility to customers building vertical applications in a wide range of industries.

Highly scaleable, FactoryLink can be used to build virtually any size application, from the simplest Human-Machine Interface (HMI) systems to the most complex and demanding Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.

FactoryLink  provides comprehensive state-of-the-art tools that empower users to configure applications tailored to satisfy their requirements. Spanning the spectrum of real-time HMI, SCADA and industrial information management applications, the versatility of the product is virtually unlimited. This flexibility is demonstrated by the more than 80,000 systems installed worldwide in diverse industries as:

Discrete

• Automotive
• Electronics
• Semiconductor
• Packaging

Hybrid

• Food and Beverage
• Pharmaceutical
• Metals
• Mining
• Printing

Process

• Utilities
• Oil and Gas
• Chemicals

Infrastructure

• Building Automation
• Transportation

The FactoryLink Advantage

Siemens FactoryLink has many distinct advantages that provide true value to our customers including...

• Lower hardware costs.
  FactoryLink's superior high performance architecture does not require as many computing resources as competitive products to achieve an equivalent level of performance. This reduces your overall hardware, software, and support costs.
• Grow as you go.
  The exception-processing architecture allows you to scale applications from the very small to the very large with minimal additional hardware costs.
• Compliance assurance.
  Detailed audit logs, multiple security levels and other advanced features facilitate building applications that are compliant with industry standards and government regulations (21 CFR Part 11, TREAD Act, etc.)
• Harness the power of the network.
  The multi-tier architecture design means that it can be deployed in a wide-array of flexible architectures including single station, multi-station client/server, and peer-to-peer.
• High availability.
  Best-in-class application redundancy and online configuration capabilities are easy to set up to ensure that your system is continuously up and running 24x7.
• Comprehensively open.
  Open, published interfaces based on industry standards lets you integrate your application seamlessly into virtually any environment.
• Everything you need.
  Only FactoryLink includes Microsoft SQL Server and true Microsoft VBA in the box, ensuring that you can assemble a complete solution without incurring additional and costly third-party licenses expenses.

Comprehensive Functionality

Every FactoryLink system comes with comprehensive functionality to get the job done as fast as possible.

FDA 21CFR Ready

Introduced in FactoryLink 7.5 is the complete set of functionality necessary to build FDA-compliant HMI/SCADA applications including digital signatures (single and double), detailed audit trails, reason codes, and more.

Graphical User Interface

FactoryLink's graphical interface is called Client Builder. It provides a comprehensive, object-oriented, visualization environment with embedded Microsoft VBA to enable a completely tailored solution. One-Click Client enables rapid deployment of client nodes across the net.

Alarms and Events

The alarm manager is completely distributed, so multiple applications can aggregate their alarms and events, allowing a single user to view, acknowledge and respond to geographically dispersed applications. Introduced in 7.5 is the ability to e-mail alarm status and acknowledgments.  FactoryLink 8.0 expands the e-mail viewer to manage active lists of nearly 10,000 alarms.

Reports

FactoryLink provides Microsoft Access reports with a comprehensive reporting application that enables up to the second analysis of monitored industrial processes. Integrators and users can add their own reports to the extensible reporting framework.

Create Applications Even Faster

Large applications are no problem with our automated creation of systems via our groundbreaking application object technology. This allows systems to be built entirely from Excel, ODBC data sources, or question and answer forms.

Networking and Redundancy

FactoryLink easily supports redundant applications with its advanced networking functionality. It is just as easy to build other network topologies including standalone, client-server, multi-station, and peer-to-peer configurations.

Trending

Users are capable of easily viewing the real-time and historical information simultaneously on any single chart, enabling operators to make more intelligent operational decisions.

Data Logging

FactoryLink provides high-speed recording of large data sets in a column-oriented schema for raw speed or a row-oriented schema to easily enable dynamic additions.

Relational Database Interfaces

FactoryLink supports any ODBC database such as SQL Server, which is included with the product. The relational database interface can communicate simultaneously with multiple back-end databases from different vendors.

XML Interface

Real-time bi-directional access to the FactoryLink database is available to any XML-enabled external application.

Device Interfaces

A rich library of external device interfaces is available covering hundreds of popular shop floor devices including PLC, RTU, and DCS hardware.

OPC Client

Standards-based communication to any OPC-enabled data source is easy and quick using the FactoryLink OPC client.

OPC Server

FactoryLink server can also be an OPC server.  You can use the OPC server to broadcast real-time data to any standard OPC client.

Math and Logic

A powerful server-side Math and Logic scripting language enables almost any unique requirement to be met. It can be either interpreted for easy debugging or compiled for maximum speed.

Recipes

A recipe task enables easy batch download and upload of process variables with FactoryLink.

Custom Tasks

Tasks developed with the programmer's access kit are completely integrated into the FactoryLink system and are configured the same as FactoryLink tasks developed by Siemens.

Performance and Scalability

FactoryLink provides the speed and performance necessary to handle all sizes of applications from very small to very large. It can scale from a system with just a few tags and one user to one with millions of tags and hundreds of users, without sacrificing performance.

Platforms

Supported platforms include Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows 2003 with graphical remote access via FactoryLink Client Builder, FactoryLink One-Click Client, or Windows Terminal Services.  Windows Vista is supported only with One-Click Client.