The Machinery OEM Integration Challenge The Challenge: When machinery OEM's provide equipment into a facility, they are often faced with the challenge of integrating with existing Human Machine Interface (HMI), DCS, or control systems. For the OEM, he does not want to have to customize his entire control or machine user interface application for each facility. At the same time, every facility's requirements are different. The Solution: The machinery OEM utilized Linkmaster and the TOP Server Modbus Ethernet Slave as the integration tool or platform for tying into a wide variety of customer systems. An example configuration is shown in the drawing on this page. The machinery OEM has his own application he developed for his machine user interface. The application uses the TOP Server to talk to his machine control. He is also using the TOP Server Modbus Ethernet Slave driver to provide a common interface into and out of his application to other systems. He defines a standardized set of tags in the TOP Server Modbus Ethernet Slave for all external interface points to his application. His application reads and writes to those tags.  When it is time to connect to a customer application, provided that the customer application supports an OPC server interface, he uses LinkMaster as a drag-and-drop integration platform. He simply picks the points in the customers OPC Server interface, maps them to his standardized tags in the TOP Server Modbus Ethernet Slave, and he's done.  Anytime values change in the customer's systems, his custom application is automatically updated.  Anytime he wants to write data to the customer's systems, the data from his application is automatically sent to the customer system by way of LinkMaster. An added benefit to this solution is that if the customer has systems that do not support OPC interfaces, but can operate as a Modbus Master, those applications can write directly into his TOP Server Modbus Ethernet slave set of standardized tags. For the end user, he benefits from the tight integration he wants between the new machine and his existing systems. For the OEM, he gets the job done quickly and easily, and has a flexible system that he can re-use from one facility to another.