The ECRIS‐Facility at the Ionenstrahllabor ISL (ion beam laboratory) consists of a 14.5 GHz‐ECR‐source, a potential‐variable beamline system and four target areas. It is dedicated to produce ions from H to Xe with charge states from 1 ⩽ q ⩽ 27, in an ion energy range from ∼1 eV to ∼450 keV depending on the effective acceleration potential up to 17 kV. To enable a user‐friendly operation of the facility, especially for guest groups, the control system CODIAN was developed. The CODIAN‐system accesses and protocols all parameters in the various hardware set‐up, saving and restoring the complete settings of all beamline components. The flexibility of the software concept and the wide range of hardware implementations will be demonstrated. © 2003 American Institute of Physics