This is my first message to our members as Chairman of the Board. I am honored to be in this new role and am working with Jose, the rest of the staff and the board to ensure that CSIA continues to deliver exceptional value to our integrator members, our and our end-user clients worldwide. We have a great year going both from the standpoint of our annual conference and from the standpoint of our financial position, which continues to be strong. And we are forecasting to have a better-than-budget year.
Our Board of Directors, Jose, Lynda and a few other staff members met face to face in Houston just prior to the Rockwell Automation Fair. We reviewed the state of CSIA, including our accomplishments over the past year. Treasurer Luigi De Bernardini presented a draft of the 2018 budget for the board’s review and comment. A final draft of this budget will be presented to the board for our December board meeting. CSIA also hosted a reception on Wednesday evening, and we had a booth at the Automation Fair where we got to talk to many of you! As you may already know, we have two new board members that joined us this year, after the annual conference in Ft. Lauderdale. They are Adrian Fahey of Sage Automation in Australia and Luigi De of Autoware in Italy. Luigi was also appointed by the board to the Treasurer role that I vacated when I moved into the Chair position. It is great to have them on the board and they are already adding tremendous value to the organization!
This past year continued to show growth in membership, as well as an increase in our member retention rate. We also saw growth in the numbers of both Certified integrators and global members, which has been great to see. Our continuous efforts at building the CSIA brand are showing some success and we continue to get contacts through the Exchange from end users looking for system integrators to hire for projects. The Exchange continues to be a great source of traffic to the controlsys.org website, with all the content that our integrators are posting on their Exchange pages. If you have yet to look at building up your Exchange presence, you really need to consider upping your game there. Integrators are telling us they are now really seeing the value of their investment.
If you haven’t already read the Certification white paper that was assembled through an independent study last summer, you certainly need to do so. This white paper showed how Certified members consistently perform better as a company than those companies that have not pursued certification. This is a great testament to what many of us who implemented Best Practices and went through the efforts to both become Certified and also continue to pursue re-Certification. At Interstates, we did it for the purpose of making ourselves a better company. I know from personal experience that our company would never have been able to sustain our level of growth year over year without implementing Best Practices. If you are thinking about beginning this journey, feel free to reach out to me, or any of the other Certified members, and we will certainly share how valuable this experience has been for us!
I want to wish each of you a wonderful holiday season - Travel safely and enjoy your time with family and friends!