Published 3/29/2019

Change for the Better, Better Together

The PMPA executive board is working on a new approach to ensure they continue to provide members with the technical support, information and networking deliverables that the team has consistently delivered.

PMPA

Mike Reader, President, PMPA

The changes in the past year were unexpected, but despite these changes, our staff has continued to perform and provide the meetings and services that make us more competitive in our businesses and operations. Our executive team has come together, evaluated many options, and through strategic planning, identified a way forward that not only stabilizes PMPA but enhances it and makes it even more sustainable.

“Better Together” is the approach that we have identified to combine the strengths of PMPA and those of our long-term partner, Gardner Business Media. Together, PMPA and Gardner have served the precision machining industry, each by its own strengths. Considering our history of successful and profitable collaboration on the PMTS show and Production Machining magazine, the surprise to our executive team was, “Why hadn’t this been considered before?”

“Better Together” describes our proposal to work with Gardner to develop a Management Services Agreement (MSA). This MSA starts with a six-month initial exploratory phase (Phase 1) that will lead us toward a long-term proposal to combine our strengths and staff to enhance the value we provide to our members. In this phase, Gardner will assess the PMPA organization and processes to identify opportunities to enhance performance and create new and improved deliverables as a result of our collaboration. “Better Together” is how we will collaborate, with both Gardner and PMPA staff bringing their unique strengths, to continue to deliver “concierge-quality” services to our membership.

The synergies of collaborating and sharing talent are exciting. We envision a future where our staff has more opportunity to work on advanced deliverables for our members, enhancing and extending the resources when combined with the Gardner/Production Machining team. Gardner brings opportunities to expand our reach and better market PMPA in our industry and beyond. PMPA can provide Gardner with a better understanding of our manufacturing niche, helping them advance the quality of their Top Shops benchmarking that, in turn, can help our members improve their own performance.

All parties will benefit as we advance the benefits of PMPA and Gardner continuing our work together. Deliberately building on the historic collaboration we believe will allow us to enhance our performance and service to members.

We have a long history of success together. Our organizations have collaborated for many years to make Production Machining and PMTS successful jointly produced brands. We think that now is the perfect time to re-focus our collaboration so that together we can deliver even greater value to PMPA members.

I can tell you that I am excited about the possibilities. Our PMPA staff, led by Miles Free and Renee Merker, is equally excited at the continuous improvements that it thinks this can have for its work on behalf of you, our members. In addition, the Gardner team continues to advance the conversation to assure that the PMPA continues to be a vital resource for our members and the industry.

We will have more details as this develops. However, I wanted you to know that your PMPA executive team has a vision that advances the interests and deliverables available for our members, through collaboration and progress with our longtime partner, Gardner Business Media. I am excited to be able to announce this development. It will be under PMPA board oversight, and at the end of Phase 1, the PMPA board and Gardner will agree on a second phase to further execute our collaboration.

“Better Together” is our vision to build on our strengths with our trusted partners at Gardner. “Better Together” is to better serve us all. “Better Together” is our vision and means of “effective associating.”