Siemens TIA-Portal

Users getting caught out with Siemens TIA-Portal

If you have worked with Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs with STEP7 Classic software for a number of years, like me you’ve probably unwittingly allowed yourself to be lulled into a false sense of security – you’ve let your guard own.  You might have fallen into the trap of “not trusting that new stuff”. Give it a bit longer, wait until it is proven, let somebody else iron out the bugs. You decided against the future, you knew it wasn’t fully developed so you decided to stick with what you knew & specified more Siemens S7-300/400.

And then came the day when the machine was installed & you started to hear that your people could not connect the laptop & get on-line. You knew they had done the training, you knew they had the right kit; it just didn’t make sense. And then you found out that it is possible to program the later Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs with TIA-Portal software. No great worries here; or was there? And then you realised that if the machine control software has been written with TIA-Portal software, you’ve can’t go online with STEP7 Classic (which is what you’ve got) & you have now got to spend potentially £2K to get the new software & to start to think about training again. Nightmare!

Well, now that’s all behind you now. You spent your unplanned £2K on TIA-Portal software & you may even have done more training. You remember how things settled down & you were happy.

But it didn’t last long. Next thing you knew, your people were telling you they couldn’t get online now with another new machine you have just had installed with a Siemens S7-1200 installed. You’ve just realised that when you bought your TIA-Portal software, you bought version 13. It was what you were told you needed & it was the latest. Having enquired with the machine builder, you’ve just learned he has written the PLC software using version 14 & you need that now. What’s going on you may be thinking, why did this never happen before?

Well, that’s that false sense of security I mentioned. STEP7 Classic had been around so long that versions didn’t change that much & we all got used to everything working all of the time. TIA-Portal is much much newer & tweaks & improvements seem to be appearing on a regular basis & that means you’re probably out of date again by now; does this sound a bit like RSLogix5000? Manufacturers seem to be spinning the wheel even faster these days & keeping up to date with software is just another quite considerable cost to consider.

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