Latin America. ConsorcioTec, the purchasing consortium for Integrators in Latin America, held the third version of ConsorcioTec Online, a periodic event to integrate members and boost their sales based on constant training on current issues on best business practices.
"The reason for doing these meetings is to help our affiliates, who are already 70 integration firms, to understand what the needs of the end customer are; both security and multimedia," said Max Jaramillo, Chief Integrator Advocate of ConsorcioTec at the beginning of the meeting.
In this session, held on October 1, 58 people participated – most of them integrators of technological systems. There the topic of how to choose the project integrator was addressed. Eduardo Téllez, CSO of Liomont; Álvaro Pardo, director of communications at the World Revival Centre, and Iván Gustavo Islas, deputy director of loss prevention for logistics and transport in Liverpool.
Precisely, Eduardo Téllez was the first to comment that Liomont, one of the leading companies in the pharmaceutical sector, with one of the most modern plants in Latin America, usually has three integrators to make a tender. "So we can compare their technological capacity and development," Eduardo said.
However, when taking on the project of growing from scratch a new plant to manufacture AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, the company decided to innovate. "We wanted to be the best in drug manufacturing from a safety point of view, and so we looked for the most advanced companies and offering the latest technology," Eduardo said.
"At that time, because of the pandemic, we could not put three companies to negotiate and make us a budget; so we relied a lot on what other companies recommended to us, not necessarily from the pharmaceutical sector, and so we made the decision of who we executed the project with," he said.
For his part, in the case of the World Revival Center, being more focused projects, Álvaro Pardo points out that they have two fronts: "There is an in-house development that becomes almost like internal integrators, and there is a work that requires an external integrator," he notes.
To evaluate the most effective system in simulcasting to the 60 venues (which includes five countries in South America, two in Central America, the United States and the Spanish city of Barcelona) required work with an integrator to determine which was the best by cost-benefit to meet the goal of projecting live without time delay.
"In that case, the integrator was chosen based on the value proposition they gave us, on the level of education they could give us on the subject and also on the entire process: from the production of the material to the moment of distribution of it," said Álvaro.
Iván Gustavo Islas agreed on the choice of integrators based on an internal process, and highlighted from Liverpool's experience that this part of what is defined in a capacity plan to determine the degree of need and the functions that must be implemented.
"In the past, it was the integrators who put the solutions, without necessarily attacking de facto the need that the end user required," recalled Iván, who stressed that previously a minimum standard must be set that any project must meet, and from there determine the level of specialization that is required when hiring an integrator.
