A union rarely certify compency or experience. Just because you're member of UAW doesn't even mean you can fix a car, much less recognize what an EGR valve looks like.
Every process is an assumption, so that argument is moot. Even a company that has a good track record has, or can assign to your contract, their bench team. As all stock avisories tell you "past performance is not an indication for future performance." Yet, that's better than nothing. People have won bids on excellent proposals, yet, crashed and burned on execution, because the execution team wasn't the proposal team, for one.
The lower bid is rarely correct or accurate. In fact, many of our customers automatically throw out the lowest and highest bids without any other evaluation, since it's pretty much a given everyone is underbidding to start with,
1. Your assertion is different that what your previous posts state. The customer has imposed NABCEP, so they're doing the restricting. NABCEP appears to be simply doing a good lobbying effort and doesn't appear to have any specific powers beyond issuing certs.
2. So? How is that different than imposing ISO certification? Surely, you aren't arguing that you shouldn't be demanded to have ISO cert as well? You'd even have better argument about that, since ISO promises nothing at all about experience or compence; it merely certs that an organization is following its own written procedures, whether the procedures correct, or efficient, or anything. In fact, ISO cert just barely guarantees that an organization appeared to be following their procedures during the certification period itself, which is only a couple of days, at the most.
3. That's your assumption. Just from experience, I can tell you that every specific job has unique constraints and issues that will not be apparent until you actually attempt to do the task. A solar installation is not just about the electricity, there are constraints on insolation, mechanical constraints, structural constraints, permits and negotiations with utilities, permits with the city, business license, etc., not one of which is in the purview of a typical industrial electrician. When does an electrician get training on what's a reasonable insolation to assume or promise? When does he get training on whether your roof needs structural reinforcement? Is he going to learn all of that on my job?
If this journeyman electrician promises 200 W/m^2 generation during daylight, is he believable? The answer is no, because, even on a clear day in Saudi Arabia, you can't even net more than about 115 W/m^2 for barely a couple of hours. So, unless he's spent time understanding a few weeks of research on insolation alone, he's barely better than someone off the street for that very critical bit of system performance.
Frankly, this is just not going to get your company anywhere, because certification requirements are increasing not decreasing. In my field, we started with self-cert to ASQ, now we're required to ISO cert. We started out with no certs on the process itself, then it went to SEI cert, and now CMMI cert. If we don't cert, we can't bid, so we get certs, and voila, we're in the race. What we do, day to day, is another matter altogether.
Likewise, I can tell you that being CMMI Level 5, which is the highest cert means diddly, since most companies don't realy follow their own processes and procedures anyway, and I've personally seen such organization produce stuff that we, as an un-certed organization, wouldn't have produced.
There will no doubt be future cert requirements that dictate that our process achieves some minimal level of requirements accuracy, once they figure out how to actually measure that with sufficient verisimilitude.
Bear in mind that I don't necessarily believe that NABCEP adds much value. Nonetheless, someone who's done 3 installations will have had to address those issues already, and will at least potentially have a reasonable basis to start my project, beyond just having read glossy brochures.
TTFN
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