Are Factories Moving Away from Systems Integrator in Favor of doing Controls In-House?

[Anonymous user]

Working with a CE from another company this week. He was saying how a lot of facilities are shying away from hiring outside Systems Integrators for their controls projects and instead opting to build their own controls projects in-house.

I'm wondering if anyone else is seeing that. I'm kind of puzzled by it since it seems like there's a severe labor shortage to begin with, and second of all I wonder if these in-house guys know about things like how to calculate panel FLAs, SCCR ratings, and other more "engineer" type tasks. In my experience they tend to be more maintenance electricians who just build it however they see fit with no regard to best practices and don't document anything they do. I've seen too many of these plants who do things themselves end up in a massive state of disrepair and confusion and then the one guy who has it all in his head retires and they end up screwed, paying out the nose for a SI to come in and straighten it all up.

[Trinxs1]

My involvement seems to be with larger corporations in MMM and WWW.   In most of these businesses I see a mix of inhouse and preferred or prescribed SI or partners.  This to me makes much better sense and it allows the inhouse to learn from the external assistance, whilst still having ownership and capability to deal with maintenance or urgent issues.  Certainly there is often a change in the preferred partner as relationships change and people move around.