NFPA Is Broadening Its Effective Forum for Networking and Promotion

NFPA Is Broadening Its Effective Forum for Networking and Promotion
by Keith Simons, President/CEO, OEM Controls

The NFPA Board of Directors convened in June 2024 to review NFPA’s performance over the past fiscal year and to make strategic decisions for moving the association forward into the future. As Chair of the NFPA Board for our 2024-25 fiscal year, it was my honor to lead a number of these important discussions. The past fiscal year saw a number of successes across the association’s four high-level strategic objectives for strengthening the fluid power industry and we set the groundwork for a number of exciting projects moving forward.

Through our Effective Forum initiative, we bring our members together in ways that allow them to find new business opportunities and advance their collective interests. Our new fiscal year sees the launch of our new Controls, IoT, and Data (CID) membership category – a place for the members who provide electronic controls, sensor technology, and/or data management services to have greater influence within our association, and to help us all better adapt to the changing fluid power technology landscape. As a CID member itself, OEM Controls, is excited by the opportunities the new membership category represents, and many of the Board’s strategic discussions centered on how best to grow this membership category and to better incorporate their unique knowledge sets into our activities. A CID Council will be launching at this year’s IEOC to help with this process and this key expansion to our already very effective forum.

Through our Business Intelligence and Statistics initiative, we provide members with the market data and intelligence to help improve their business decision making. NFPA will continue to offer its one-of-a-kind market information portfolio of reports and surveys that help you define and understand the size of the fluid power market and your role in it – and we’ll continue to broaden our general business intelligence gathering and sharing activities. Engagement with our CID members and with a growing cohort of participating OEM engineers will be key in these efforts, as we track and report more formally on the pace of new technology adoption in our industry and in the many markets we serve.

Through our Promote Fluid Power initiative, we provide our members with opportunities and resources to promote themselves and their technology. The biggest news here, of course, is the new partnership with iVT EXPO – where NFPA members can promote their products and services, and provide targeted education to a new audience of OEM engineers across many mobile end markets. Expanding this outreach to additional shows – including some on the industrial side of our industry, will be a key objective for the year ahead. We thank the many members of our Technology Task Forces, which are helping to identify and develop the educational resources most needed by our OEM customers. Also growing in impact is our Fluid Power Forum podcast, now with more than 120 episodes and 42,000 downloads, an increasingly key tool in spreading the word about advances in our industry. The best thing we can do is share these episodes in our network to help reinforce fluid power as a modern and thriving technology.

And through our Educated Workforce initiative, we are increasing the number of fluid power-educated students and connecting them to careers in the industry. We do this primarily through our Fast Track to Fluid Power and University Power Partner programs, and we ended this fiscal year with 3 Fast Track Hubs and 7 Power Partner Universities up and running. Through the on-going support of members through our Pascal Giving Society, we are making the plans and investments necessary to scale these key programs to more locations over the next several years. Another important item of note is the continued growth and expansion of our Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge program. This unique design/build challenge, which directly connects undergraduate engineers working with fluid power to careers in our industry, will be expanded to three event sites this upcoming year, allowing us to accommodate more student teams than ever before. A special thanks goes out to all the NFPA member companies that support and make this program possible.

Our Board is excited by the many opportunities that lie ahead in the coming year, both for NFPA and the fluid power industry as a whole. Many thanks to my fellow Board members for the help they provide in shaping our organization’s and industry’s future. I’m looking forward to working with the Board, staff, and NFPA members to continue growing our organization. I am open to questions and comments as we continue to forge ahead and bring enhanced value to members. I can be reached at ksimons@oemcontrols.com.