So a few years ago, the group decided it could best serve its clients by showing the manufacturing industry that its members were screened and vetted for high-quality technical and project management skills.
“Clients look to a good integrator to tell them what their options are. They want a vision of possibilities,” says Norm O’Leary, executive director of CSIA. “They need to know the best business practices, not just the technical solutions.”
So CSIA developed an audit that revealed the technical and best-business-practice skills of integrators. The executive committee at CSIA decided to make it mandatory for its registered members to learn and demonstrate skills in both the technical side of integration as well as the business side.
The audit is self-grading and tells the integrator where it is weak. “Everyone who took the audit—whether they passed or failed—said it was tremendous,” O’Leary relates. “The integrators can see their weaknesses, and if they improve, it makes them a better company.”
Once a company passes the CSIA audit—a process that can take two or three years—it gains credibility among its client base. Companies such as National Instruments, Rockwell Automation and Schneider Electric have spent time sitting in on CSIA’s integrator audit and believe that the companies that pass are top integrators.
“Anyone with a business card can claim to be a systems integrator,” says Jay Jeffreys, program manager for the systems integrator program at Wonderware, a Lake Forest, Calif.-based unit of Invensys. “CSIA has set up a hurdle. If you’re a registered CSIA integrator, you have at least two developers who have passed the CSIA exam and you have at least two reference-able projects—that means at least two customers who are not angry with you.”
The audit vets for project management and business understanding as well as technical capabilities. “CSIA examines whether its integrators have business capability,” says Jack Barber, the alliance partner program manager at National Instruments Corp., in Austin, Texas. “If you’re registered with CSIA, you have project management wherewithal.”
See the story that goes with this sidebar: System Integrators take on ROI responsibility
