Siemens Industry

Siemens tends to be a best fit for customers competing in a global market. Siemens has been an industry leader in computerized control design from its inception. Ai Control Systems is proud of our close working relationship with Siemens and we are proud to support. We are looking for opportunities to help bring new solutions to market with our customers. Below we offer a simple professional assessment that is editorial in nature based on general experience.

Siemens is an innovator by investing and modernizing its PLC (Programmable Logical Controls) and Operator Interfaces.  They completely redesigned their development environment in 2009 and renamed it TIA Portal, making it a unified development.  This was a great improvement over their legacy programming design environment that is anything before version Step7 5.5.   They kept ahead of other products manufactures with updated features like operator screens that are higher resolution.

It can be difficult to find products and assess, chose and find products for Siemens.  Overall language is not typically a barrier, some terms and abbreviations are intuitive to Native English speakers.     For example: we may call it an “Analog Card” and they may say “Signal Module”.

The new 1200 PLC is very affordable and when combined with remote I/O is very scalable.  It can often replace the standard S7-300 at a fraction of the cost.  The new 1500 makes the ease of use more comparable to Allen Bradly Compact Logix platform.  In general there is more memory management required for the Siemens platform in development.  Getting start with Siemens takes an effort.  Hopefully this will change when the 1500 becomes more mainstream.

Support is freely available for Siemens.  Premium support serves come with additional costs.  Integrators and vendors may have better free access to resources.

A full package for a machine implemented with Siemens products tend to look professionally designed.  Sometimes the sleek look isn’t practical in difficult environments.  For example: the text color used on products for part numbers doesn’t stand out against their background color.