In large scale facilities like accelerators, synchronization is not only about triggering. Other aspects of synchronization, namely synchronous data acquisition and/or collection and data time-stamping are equally important. In this paper we first discuss the general synchronization requirements of modern accelerators and then describe our approach to address such requirements in PSI-XFEL project. In our XFEL test stand we have implemented a full-featured synchronization system by integrating off-the-shelf hardware into a distributed control system (EPICS). By full-featured we mean a unified mechanism which addresses all aforementioned synchronization requirements (triggering, synchronous data acquisition/collection, time-stamping). We describe in detail our method to achieve this and explain what software components we had to develop in addition to available control system software.