Podcast: Exploring the evolving role of system integrators in modern manufacturing
Key takeaways
- Remote audits and digital training options have made certification more accessible and cost-effective for system integrators worldwide.
- Emerging leaders and diverse voices are reshaping the system integration industry, ensuring long-term relevance and innovation.
- System integrators are key enablers of modern asset management, driving smarter maintenance through automation and data.
- Hands-on experience across industries makes integration work a powerful career path for engineers entering manufacturing.
In this episode of Great Question: A Manufacturing Podcast, Tom Wilk, the chief editor of Plant Services, talks with Jose Rivera, the CEO of the Control System Integrators Association (CSIA). In December, Jose announced he would be stepping down after a decade of dedicated leadership and strategic vision. Under Jose's guidance, the CSIA has seen significant modernization, increased resilience, and a strong financial position. We spoke with Jose when he joined the CSIA 10 years ago and it's my privilege to talk with him one more time to look back over the past 10 years, and then look ahead at next steps for both Jose and the CSIA, including the launch of the the CSIA Learning Hub.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
PS: Ten years ago we got to meet together in the Plant Services / Putman Media office in Schaumburg (IL), and I can't believe 10 years went by that quickly.
JR: I agree 10 years. It's a really long time, but today, it feels like it went by faster than it should have.
PS: As you look back and close out your decade with the CSIA, what are some of the moments that you look back on with satisfaction or pride?
JR: If you look back 10 years, it's a significant amount of time to allow for changes in our industry. That would have happened in any case for our industry, for our members, for our association. But if you add on top of it the pandemic, the COVID-19 pandemic, that was then a dramatic transformation period. And so when I look back, I'm very proud of how we took a proactive approach to all of this. First to help our Members make it and thrive through the pandemic; and also for us as an association, a not-for-profit association, when it comes to the important things, not always on top of mind when you're trying to help your company survive, but we were able to get that done and we were able to introduce some important changes. So we took advantage of the opportunity and made it happen.
Every association is challenged to stay relevant through generational transitions, right? In the case of CSIA, we were founded in 1994 and many of the founding fathers (and I said fathers because all of them were men) have either retired or are on their process to retire. In 2016, we started to develop an initiative called Emerging Leaders – at that time, we had a different name, but now it's called Emerging Leaders – to help us nurture and expand the role of the incoming leaders of the system integration companies, such that they could also have incoming role within CSIA and to ensure that our association would stay relevant through this important change. So we have been increasing the role that they play at our conference. They get to organize one of our tracks and several of them have now joined the board (when you take a look and remember how I was saying founding fathers, today the chair is a female); we have had two past chairs that were from outside of the U.S. and when you take a look at the membership, the participation of women at our in our conference has increased significantly. You have younger generations participating. All of that is good for any association because you don't want to become your father's Oldsmobile, right? Our association has made a very big effort to stay relevant.
The other thing that I wanted to say is that a big part of the value that CSIA provides is the Best Practices Manual. This is where we put our knowledge for helping system integrators build better companies. Then in addition to the best practices we have the certification, so those who want to can request it, they get audited and if they pass, they’re certified. So remember when we had the pandemic, we couldn't travel, right, so we could not conduct these audits in person. Before the pandemic, that was the only way to conduct the audits. So I felt that we needed to do something. I had witnessed some of our audits and I saw that system integrators were already leveraging virtual technology. If they were checking in on a project that included resources from outside that office, they would dial them in, and then that was part of the audit.
So we worked together – the Certification Committee, the board, and I – to create a protocol for doing remote audits, and that remains an option for system integrators. They can go the in-person version, but the remote audit is an option and so we have that and we're going to keep that. I think it allows for especially international members to do their audit and keep it keep the cost under wraps.
The other thing that I'm very proud of is our role when it comes to training, we're calling it more like professional development. We are about to launch (and it will happen at the conference) the launch of the CSIA Learning Hub. So it's an offer of digital online training that we have prepared with the specific workforce of the system integrators in mind, so it's very relevant to what they have. So 10 years, a long time!
PS: It's a long time and you listed some serious accomplishments just now. And isn't it interesting how a change in generational leadership dovetails so well with these improved certification opportunities? That's something I'm noticing on the maintenance side at conferences, the next generation, the Millennials and the GenZ’s who are moving up the ranks, they're curious about how they get further professionalized and certified, and it sounds like the CSIA is parallel with that effort.
JR: When I started, two of our board meetings were done in person and the other ones were remote, but remote at that time meant dialing in teleconference. Just phone. And everybody was then following a Word document outlining the topics to discuss. We did not have to wait for the pandemic. We moved on to have shared screens and then and then video and the whole thing. And so now it's a given, but you know, 10 years ago, when it started, it was not a given for CSIA. It was not. So I think it's now something that the others will be able to leverage. I love to meet in person, but I also see all the benefits of being able to do this remotely. It's so efficient, and now we're comfortable with it.
PS: Completely agree. I remember when remote access to computers was pretty much the domain of people with a crash cart going into solve problems on the IT side, and now we all have this capability.
Let’s move to the training topic you mentioned earlier and I'll take us back to 2015, the first time we spoke. You said that two of your goals at that time were (1) to grow the CSIA by expanding abroad, especially to Mexico and (2) to augment the CSIA training offerings across the board. So I guess my question is, have those goals been achieved to your satisfaction?
JR: Yes, and let me let me start with the international expansion. When I joined, we already had a chapter in Latin America and we had a regional director there and we were working to develop it. So now 10 years later, we have doubled and so we have around 50 companies in Latin America. Half of them are in Mexico, then the rest are distributed between Colombia, Costa Rica, Puerto Rico, and Brazil.
What I think has been the biggest success is that CSIA as an organization, or as an association, was started with a group of system integrators that got together to help each other out. From the very beginning they were collaborative and so there was no need to convince them of that. But when we moved this to Latin America, there was a lot of trust that needed to be built because this whole thing about like being able to talk to your “competitors,” it's not the most natural thing. But by having regular events and I was putting a lot of effort at the very beginning of my time with CSIA and having in-person events sponsored by our partners, we were able to develop a culture of collaboration. Unlike when we started the association in the states where that was a given, over there we had to build it, and today we have it.
My ambition was bigger. My ambition was also to go into Europe. So we do have a few system integrators there. We started an effort, initially it was going to be Germany, and then we had the pandemic and that slowed the whole thing down. That one I don't view it as a success, you know, the pandemic was one thing that took us down and I think we need to revisit it. This will be now the role for the new CEO of CSIA. But I think it's important for CSIA to continue to broaden its geographical footprint beyond the U.S.
So the other part that you asked me about was training. It is something that we have been working in different formats. CSIA has always had just before the start of the conference a two-day best practices workshop. Initially it was for those companies that wanted to get certified, and this would allow them the opportunity to participate in this training and discuss with the companies that were going to audit them, all the different things so that was great. We continue to have that and it still remains a very popular two-day workshop.
We have added two other workshops. (1) marketing – I think this year will be the third year, a total success, what it has done is it has brought a new audience within the system integrator companies to the conference. These are the people that do the marketing that in the past were not very present at our conference. (2) business risk – for two years we had one that was called the Value Workshop and it was related to valuation of your company for M&A (our industry has gone through a lot of consolidation) and it was done by a banker, an accounting and finance company. It was very valuable for those owners that were looking into selling or buying. This year, we're going to have one about business risk. Every company runs into risks and there are strategies to mitigate those risks or cover for those risks. Oftentimes it involves insurance, other times it requires legal, so we are going to have two of those companies that are part of CSIA provide this workshop. I think it's very interesting. A lot of us think that insurance is a very boring topic, and it probably is, but it's still a very important topic for companies to really protect their businesses.
PS: Every now and then I'll try to write a new article on the fact that the maintenance team's best friend actually can be the finance and insurance team, because the more maintenance can demonstrate that they reducing the risk and exposure faced by the company through healthier assets, the lower your premium is going to be and the more you can argue that your team's function is contributing more to the bottom line. It’s a relationship which needs to be encouraged, I think.
JR: Absolutely. To continue with this training, what we were doing outside of the conference, trying to extend the value we were delivering throughout the year, we tried multiple things. We did some project management remote training with an instructor, and then we also did it once that was about the “preparation of quotes” and this was self-taught.
We are now getting ready to launch what we call the Learning Hub, and I think it's a very interesting concept. We have some CSIA commissioned content, but we also have (and I think this is the most valuable part) curated playlists. Everybody now understands playlists, right? And then you have playlist or recommended courses for people within the system integration company with different positions. Our goal is to have them for different levels, so if you are a new engineer entering a system integration company fresh out of college, then you will be introduced into topics that most likely you didn't get to address while in college. Things like finance, risk management, how to work with teams, or how to manage a team of engineers, things like emotional intelligence, all these different things. We have created this recommended list by position to go and take those courses when they have time to do so – check the list, you know, and move on. That one we will be launching at the conference, and I'm very excited about it.
PS: Your comments about the next generation sort of lead me to our next topic, which is the newer and younger workers moving into integration. What's your sense of how appealing or how popular integration work is with these folks? And do you see them as being drawn to the manufacturing side of integration, or the healthcare side, or the finance side? Is it a little bit of everything?
JR: Even if I reflect back to my experience, I'm an engineer and so when I went to engineering school and after that, I started now looking for a job. Big brands was what attracted me, so I started my career with Siemens, which is a huge brand, then and what I will say is that that provides an advantage for those companies because those brands are recognized.
That is not the case for system integrators, to be totally honest, and it's not fair to expect that they would have the same brand. But system integrators offer very interesting career paths or careers that develop their experience. If you are a system integrator engineer, you will very likely be involved in projects across multiple clients, multiple industries, and probably multiple applications. That is a richness of experience, especially right out of college. Where else would you get that in a short period of time? To me, that's very appealing, so what this does is it forces system integrators to tell their story and come to campus and participate in those recruiting weeks, participate in in co-ops for those universities that offer them. This way they can overcome the lack of recognizable brands within their students, and so then they can make their careers very appealing.
I think that that is a very attractive feature, and what I will also say is that today's system integration work, its technology work. The role of IT in all these platforms, I mean, it’s something that a lot of engineering students strive to be part of and that is very possible through regular system integration work.
PS: That reminds me of last year's conversation with a couple of integrators from CSIA member organizations, where we were talking about the application of integration work to the maintenance function. They made a couple of observations which made me realize that maintenance over the past 10 years probably would not be where it is without the work of integrators to enable increased automation in the plant, but also to improve the collection and movement and analysis of machine health data.
It's funny to see that the percentage of work that's reactive has stayed the same over the past 10 years even as we're working with fewer people, so it's these integrator efforts to help the maintenance teams out, to help increase automation, which has helped them cover up that skills gap. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the ability of the integrators to facilitate operations and maintenance in this way, through increased automation and improved access to machine health data.
