Control Engineering

Yes, if you use the latest release of FactoryLink.

Doing more with less is a well-worn topic in these years of economic downturn. It has become easy to scoff at such claims since most of us believe that we are always working with less and less, but not necessarily achieving more. In the world of manufacturing automation, however, a product that has the capability to deliver on its promise—such as larger applications (point count) and more applications (system count) with less time, less risk, and less resources—is worth an examination.

For all this talk of “doing more with less” to mean something to an engineer who’s heard it all before, specific details must be provided. That’s why Tecnomatix is highlighting two important areas that allow you to do more with less using FactoryLink 7.2. The first area of focus is the timesaving advantage of FactoryLink’s advanced, object-oriented configuration tools. The second area of focus is on the high-performance exception-processing architecture that allows you to deploy less hardware and infrastructure to solve a problem with less complexity.

Create More in Less Time with Leading Edge Configuration Tools

FactoryLink incorporates a leading edge set of application configuration tools designed to help you do more with less risk, time, and effort. These object-oriented tools provide advanced functionality, such as:

• A time-saving feature called application objects that supports the importation of data from diverse systems such as Excel, relational databases, flat files, or even user input via custom HTML dialogs;

• Support for concurrent development, allowing multiple application developers to work simultaneously on the same application, thereby decreasing the time required to complete a project;

• Advanced branching capability that powers rapid application development by allowing any individual graphical symbol or arbitrary group of symbols to be dynamically attached to a “branch” or group of related tags. New application screens can be developed in less time by changing a single name; and

• A powerful graphics development environment that supports a rich set of features including: layering, decluttering, run-time pan and zoom, arbitrary path animations, and client-side Microsoft Visual Basic with a fully exposed object model.

Process More Data with Less Complexity

At the core of FactoryLink is a patented [U.S. Patent 4,908,746] exception-processing real-time kernel. Unique in the industry, this high-performance kernel design ensures that tasks communicating with the kernel consume computing resources only when tags they are dependent on change in value. This ensures a high degree of application processing efficiency and system throughput with a minimum amount of underlying computing infrastructure—the very essence of “doing more with less.”

Using less infrastructure and resources to implement an application results in simpler configurations giving you higher reliability, easier deployment and more manageability.

More or Less?

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