NFPA Provides Industry Statistics That Improve Your Decision Making

By Eric Lanke
NFPA President/CEO

As our Board chair Ray Chambers recently communicated, the NFPA Board of Directors met virtually in late June 2020 for its annual strategic retreat. Among other topics of focus, the Board reviewed the program successes NFPA achieved in its 2019-20 fiscal year. In this post, I would like to share with our membership ways for them to connect to those successful programs, especially those associated with NFPA’s second major objective: Providing our members with timely and accurate industry statistics and business intelligence that support improved decision-making.

In Ray’s previous post, he summarized our success in this area like this:

“Industry Statistics is what we call our objective of providing our members with the market data and intelligence they need to improve their business decision-making. Here, we grew member participation in most of our key data programs, and especially in our Stats Toolkit, which is allowing more members than ever to combine their company data with our market trends and leading indicators to better understand the future of their businesses. Last year’s Industry and Economic Outlook Conference was a strong success, with plans now confirmed to conduct this year’s program on a virtual platform that can deliver both the content and networking opportunities our members expect from this event.”

There are a lot of ways for members to engage in these successful programs.

• Unfortunately, you just missed our first successful virtual Industry and Economic Outlook Conference (IEOC), which was held August 11-13 on computers all over the Internet. The good news is that all the presentations were recorded, and you can still buy access to them and their embedded forecasts, which will be hosted on the IEOC web portal for 60 days following the conference. Like the live event members have come to rely on, the virtual event included presentations from Alan Beaulieu and Alex Chausovsky of ITR Economics, Michael Reed of Oxford Economics, and Eli Lustgarten of ESL Consultants – as well as detailed market forecasts for Construction Machinery, Agriculture Machinery, Heavy Trucks, Metalworking/Machine Tools, and other industrial markets. Two other special presentations – one by Sergio Rebelo of the Kellogg School of Management on the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and another by Sam Potolicchio of the Preparing Global Leaders Forum on geopolitical trends likely to impact business – were highly evaluated by participants.
  • To get your pass to the entire IEOC 2020 virtual library, go to https://nfpahub.com/events/conferences/industry-economic-outlook-conference-ieoc-post-event-presentation-access/
• Our Participation-Based Programs provide unique value to NFPA members because they are built by and for the members themselves. In our Confidential Shipment Statistics (CSS) Program, members submit their sales and order data, and NFPA, working with a third-party provider, aggregates that data to publish monthly reports that are broken down by both market segment and by product. These help members accurately determine their market share by comparing their sales volume to the total volume of all other members making the same product or selling into the same market. In our State of the Fluid Power Industry (SOFP) Survey, members provide a quick read on where they see their businesses going in the next month, the next quarter, and the next year. The survey results appear in a simple forecast for the industry, which has been statistically proven to lead actual conditions by six or seven months, providing participating members with a clear planning advantage over those not participating. And in our Customer Market Survey (CMS), members report their sales by customer market, the aggregated data from which reveals the total volume of fluid power products being sold into each of our industry’s key customer markets.
  • Samples of all three reports are available at https://nfpahub.com/stats/market-information-services/.To get your company participating, contact Eric Armstrong at earmstrong@nfpa.com.
• At this time of intense uncertainty, NFPA’s Forecast Reports provide key information to help you make better decisions. The one on U.S. markets is prepared by ITR Economics and provides detailed forecasts for 28 customer markets important to the fluid power industry. The one on global markets is prepared by Oxford Economics and provides detailed overviews and forecasts for our key markets in 68 different countries. They are indispensable tools for NFPA members working to develop an industry-wide outlook and strategy for their businesses.To download the latest forecast reports, which are updated either monthly or quarterly, depending on the market, visit https://nfpahub.com/stats/market-information-services/.
• The latest addition to our portfolio is our Regional Demand Estimates Report. Prepared by Oxford Economics, this report profiles the geographic distribution of fluid power products to end-use industries by state and includes estimates for fluid power sales dollars and fluid power sales percentages. This new report helps with benchmarking your company’s regional sales performance and determining sales targets and goals for your company.Go to https://nfpahub.com/stats/info-category/regional-demand-estimates/ for all the details.
• And finally, most of these programs – and several more – become even more valuable when used in combination with our free analysis tool, the NFPA Stats Toolkit. This is one of the most important and most under-used weapons in NFPA’s arsenal. Members who use the Stats Toolkit turn data into intelligence. They find leading indicators for their businesses, they create custom forecasts, and they make smarter decisions for their companies. We’re focused on getting many more members using this critical tool. We see it as central to our mission of strengthening the fluid power industry.And so, we want to offer anyone who’s interested in learning more a free demo so you can better understand what the Toolkit does and how you can leverage it for your business. Please contact Eric Armstrong at earmstrong@nfpa.com to get something scheduled as soon as possible.

All of these activities mean that NFPA is the best source for industry statistics and market intelligence for fluid power. If you would like your company to become more engaged with NFPA, please reach out to me at elanke@nfpa.com or (414) 778-3351.