CSIA to present Certification Bootcamp 
March 29-30 in Dallas, Texas
Sponsored by Invensys Operations Management

Taking the audit requires a fair amount of preparation on the part of numerous company employees. Someone has to be appointed to direct these efforts to assure that all of the specified audited items are ready for review.  

CSIA and Exotek are conducting a training session for companies preparing for the audit. This 2-day Certification Bootcamp will be held in Dallas, March 29-30, 2011 and will review the systems, policies and procedures necessary to successfully pass a CSIA Certification Audit. The intent of the class is to prepare the internal champion with a clear understanding of the requirements and provide some advice on how to prepare for the audit. The material will be presented by the same people that perform the audits. The content will be based on the experience gained by the auditors and will include examples and templates where appropriate. The material covered will only be those sections of the CSIA Best Practices & Benchmarks Guidelines Rev (03) that are addressed in the audit. 

For a complete description and registration information see www.controlsys.org. We highly recommend you consider sending your audit leader and perhaps other key personnel. We have 12 registrations already! 

A video invitation from CSIA President,
Lynda J. Patterson, MS, CAE

Real Mexican food is great, especially the HOT stuff! 

Yes, I was south of the border in February giving presentations on CSIA. We owe a great deal of thanks to Lasso, a distributor who knows CSIA very well because some of their vendors are current and soon-to-be Partner members. The Partners that supported Lasso at these events were Hollysys (Beijing) and Advantech. Future Partner members were Turck and Pepperl & Fuchs.

The presentations were held in Monterrey and Mexico City as part of CSIA's strategic plan to grow its international membership. Lasso and its suppliers are excited about control system integrators in Mexico having the opportunity to improve their business operations just like so many other North American CSIs have. These Partners tell me that they've learned the value of CSIA because it strengthens the CSI industry and that increases the probability of their products being integrated well. 

Webinars will be held soon for the Mexican CSIs that could not attend the events. To learn more about these webinars, email me at execdir@controlsys.org.   

CSIA looks forward to having all Latin American system integrators become fully integrated in CSIA activities! 

Thank You again to Lasso and their supporting vendors!

Bob Lowe
Executive Director 

by Don Roberts, Exotek 

I have the benefit of being able to reflect back on this industry to days when it was just starting. Back then one of the observations was that we needed a more structured approach to dealing with the delivery of increasingly complex projects. So along came Allen Bradley's 11 phase Project Methodology. This type of methodology has been adapted and changed over the years and forms a significant portion of the current Best Practices manual.  

What you are going to see coming up in future releases of the Best Practices is an expansion on other ways of delivering work. Clearly a robust waterfall project methodology will not work for the delivery of service calls and minor system adjustments. In this environment we need to be able to deal with response time and service level agreements. I am sure you will be pleased with how these topics are covered in the next release of the Best Practices and ultimately how they fit into CSIA Certification.

I have been looking out beyond the next release to try and get a sense of what other approaches we should be investigating as best practices for delivering complex systems. There is a whole different world out there when you start thinking about Agile and XP and Scrum. Are these things that we should be considering or maybe you already are? I would love to hear your feedback if you have some experience here. Better yet, I invite you to join the Best Practices committee and see if you can influence the future of this industry. DonRoberts@Exotek.com 
 

by Paul Barnard 

We welcome Prousys Inc of Bakersfield, California to our Program.

Professional Errors & Omissions
We believe Professional Errors & Omissions coverage is fundamental to a satisfactory package of insurance for control system integrators. Increasingly, such coverage is being mandated by customers and for ever-higher limits. So what is this coverage?

In the course of business, companies sometimes find themselves in disputes over alleged failures of their services or products that have caused financial damage to third parties. An Errors and Omissions or Professional Liability policy will cover defense and settlement expenses associated with services provided.

We can provide this coverage as part of an overall portfolio of coverage with the same insurance carrier providing both General Liability/Completed operations and Professional Errors & Omissions. This approach resolves the issue of coverage gaps between your General Liability and E & O carriers. Such issues can delay any settlement of a loss and severely damage your customer relationship.

For more information on how the CSIA Insurance programs can work for you to protect your assets and potential liabilities please contact our Insurance Program Manager, Paul Barnard. You can reach Paul at paulbarnard@csia-insurance.com

or (610) 507-6595.

CSIA is grateful for the opportunity to have attended the ARC Forum in February. It's an event that brings together people from companies in various capacities of manufacturing and automation. For details on the event see Bob Lowe's two blogs.

ARC has uploaded all speaker presentations to the forum site. They expect video recordings to be ready to view within a few weeks.  Please note that due to ARC policies and restrictions, some presentations and/or recordings are not available. Click here for the forum presentation & recording site. (If you are registered on their website, log-in using your user name and password.  If you are not registered or do not remember your password, log-in using the following user name and password: user name - arcforum, password - arcforum2011)

Over the next several weeks and months, ARC will be writing many reports about the various topics discussed at the forum. They will also be creating several online communities to continue on-going dialog about these topics.

CSIA encourages our members to attend ARC World Industry Forum 2012 which will be held Feb. 6-9 in Orlando, Florida.

Move over Oscar

by Jim Campbell 

The Oscars are over, so get prepared for the next big awards event. At the upcoming CSIA Executive Conference, we will be presenting awards for outstanding contributions to CSIA and commitment to the profession of control system integration. 

Since December, we've been collecting nominations for Board of Directors, committee membership, the Charlie Bergmann Award, the Partner Award, and the Rising Star Award. 

But we need more - especially for the Rising Star Award. I'm sure you have someone in your organization who deserves to be recognized for performing above and beyond. Some criteria to consider are:
· Less than 15 years in their present company
· Significant accomplishments in your business, profession, or industry
· Exemplary leadership skills
· Strong commitment to the professionalism of CSIA

Please use the official award nomination form when you send in your nomination to Lynda Patterson. Nominations must be received before the end of March.

Do it now! The deadline is looming!! Please email me with any questions. Thank you very much. 

To voice mail or not to voice mail
by Carl Utter 

I have two seemingly paradoxical views on voice mail.

Voice Mail Strategy # 1
Problem: People don't call you back so why bother? Or, if you do leave a voice mail message, and you don't get a call back, what do you do? Call back again, right? That can seem like you're desperate. The reason I don't like leaving messages is that you've given up control of when the call will actually take place. Solution: Make six to eight attempts to reach someone before you leave a voice mail, and use strategy #2 to prepare a message.

Voice Mail Strategy # 2
Think of a voice mail message as your own personal radio commercial. What makes you listen to a commercial? Here is a simple formula.
1. Make it interesting. You can't bore people into buying. Get creative. Put some real energy into it . . . go for it.
2. After you get their attention, capture their interest. Tell them what's in it for them. Why should they call you back? You're a sales person for crying out loud, convince them!
3. Script this out. I did some work for a client where we created eight voice mail scripts of the specific market and the buyers with whom they wanted to meet. The results were a 20% call back rate. But these were real good scripts. Don't wing it.
4. You must make a compelling reason why they should call you back. Create an offer - perhaps a promise of a free report with data of significance to them. If you don't have an offer, then get one. It gives people that compelling reason to return your call.

Policy on use of CSIA Best Practices and Benchmarks Manual 

One of our integrator members recently asked about how the Best Practices Manual can be used within his company. It was obvious to him that it was copyright protected so the manual couldn't be given to anyone outside his company, but it was unclear how it can be used internally. As an example, he wondered if portions of it could be copied and inserted in their documentation, such as in a Quality Assurance manual or in a newsletter. That question had never been posed to CSIA, but it became apparent that we needed a formal policy. So this library document is the outcome of discussion by the Executive Council. The policy provides the information needed regarding the use of some or all of the Best Practices and Benchmarks Manual within CSIA integrator member companies.

See the "Best Practices" Resource Library for the policy.
 

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