INDUSTRY COMMENT Different backgrounds, same goals


BCIA President Graeme Rees celebrates the continuing evolution of the organisation and how its members all strive for what is best for the building controls industry with innovation, guidance and debate


S


ince its formation in 1991 the BCIA has never stood still. Always evolving, the BCIA has continued to work with other


organisations, such as BESA, ECA, CIBSE, BIFM, FETA, sharing and gaining knowledge as part of its overall aim to promote better understanding, application and use of building controls.


Part of what has added to the


strength of the BCIA is the diversity of its membership. In the early days most members were controls manufacturers, but during his spell as Chairman Roger Woodward began to introduce system


integrators into the BCIA, as he explains: “Some of the bigger companies were a bit set in their ways and took a while to accept the changes, but the whole industry has certainly changed and now about 75 per cent of the industry are system integrators and they have become the dominant force.”


Diversity is also evident in the different routes people have taken into the industry. This is well demonstrated by the three recent additions to the BCIA’s Management Committee. Simon Patman, for example, has almost 20 years of direct industry experience in various roles including design, engineering, project management and sales, while Stacey Lucas started out as a Customer Service Advisor and worked her way up to become Commercial and Marketing Director at Sontay. In contrast, Matt Brown has over 25 years’ experience as a Management Accountant and is relatively new to the building controls industry. Their respective backgrounds will, however, prove extremely valuable and will bring a fresh perspective to the work the Management Committee, and its sub-groups, the Marketing, Skills and Technical


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Working Groups, are involved in. Work by the Technical Working Group, for example, goes towards helping members and those in the building controls and BEMS industry work more effectively by providing guidance on best practice. For example, the Technical Guide to control sensors, entitled “Good Practice Guide – Control Sensor Selection and Installation”, sets out to describe good selection of Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) sensors used in Building Energy Management Systems (BEMS).


Improving our understanding


Whatever our members’ varying walks of life, they all contribute to the evolvement of the group just as the system integrators have done and what master systems integrators look set to do. Few, if any, industries benefit from standing still and awareness of trends and issues in not just our own sector but neighbouring sectors as well is vital for us to improve our understanding of the wider built environment and to help make it more sustainable. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and each year the


quantity and quality of entries to the Annual BCIA Awards somehow manages to build on the exceptional heights set in the previous year. This is largely due to how this industry drives itself forward with debate, constructive criticism and pride in our work that creates extremely healthy industry competition. I’m sure you are as excited as I am to see who will be revealed as the winners at this year’s event on 5 May and I hope to see many of you there. It promises to be another fantastic occasion.


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Read the latest at: www.bsee.co.uk BUILDING SERVICES & ENVIRONMENTAL ENGINEER MAY 2022 7


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