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NPCA Names VP of Technical Services

NPCA has named Gregory A. Stutz as vice president of Technical Services. Stutz will direct NPCA’s technical staff and represent the association in technical and industry standards forums. He will also oversee all NPCA technical committees.

An industry veteran with more than 20 years of precast engineering experience, Stutz comes to NPCA after a two-year detour in the health sciences industry. He was most recently a health sciences program manager at Roche Diagnostics, an Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical company.

Before his position at Roche, Stutz led engineering, research and development, and quality assurance at Hartford Concrete Products Inc. in Hartford City, Ind. From 2001 to 2005 he was vice president of Business Development and Administration. During his tenure, he expanded Hartford’s market to prestressed structural components, water detention and retaining wall systems. He helped pioneer a new network of business and government contracts for Hartford Concrete. Some of the contracts included the development of new product entries into the Homeland Security market.

Cornerstone of Success

By Bridget McCrea

NPCA’s Educational Foundation raises the bar when it comes to supporting the future of the precast industry.

Years ago, Press-Seal Gasket Corp. realized that to stay ahead of its competitors and produce the highest-quality products possible, the Fort Wayne, Ind.-based manufacturer of watertight products would need to get behind a new educational effort that NPCA was developing at the time.

“The precast industry was facing competitive challenges from other materials,” recalls Jim Skinner, company president. “We felt it was important to have a foundation that could deliver quality education to a broad base of members about the different products they produce – all in an effort to keep the quality of precast concrete higher than that of competitive materials.”

The NPCA Educational Foundation has done that and more since being launched in 1985 as a way to help producer and supplier members meet the new challenges they were facing in the industry. More than 20 years ago, NPCA visionary leaders created a scholarship committee to help attract new people into the precast industry. A few years later, the scholarship committee formalized its vision by establishing the NPCA Educational Foundation.

Today the foundation is digging its heels into a new challenge that NPCA members like Skinner are supporting through substantial monetary pledges. Through a $50,000 pledge from him and his wife, Skinner is helping to support the foundation’s training efforts and industry education.

“It’s difficult for small companies to gain access to information on quality programs and quality systems,” Skinner reasons. “We felt that this donation could be used for years to come in educating the membership on how to keep quality standards high.”

High standards
Howard Wingert, president at Concrete Sealants Inc. in Tip City, Ohio, has been involved with the foundation since 1996 and recently pledged $50,000 to the group’s educational efforts. He is enthused by the fact that the foundation has strengthened since it was founded in 1985. A board member, Wingert says recent efforts to build up a monetary fund and run the foundation on the interest earned (rather than the donations themselves) have been a big step in the right direction.

“That’s allowing us to consider funding projects that will provide support for the developing of marketing programs, educational programs for people outside the industry and even fund research that verifies the value and use of precast concrete,” says Wingert.

Since 1989, the NPCA Educational Foundation has awarded scholarships to students preparing for future careers as engineers in the construction industry. And where its efforts have focused primarily on scholarship support in the past, the group is now poised to become an even stronger force in the industry by helping NPCA members in an ever more technical and competitive business environment.

To get there, the foundation has aggressively embarked on a $3 million campaign to create an endowment that would fund a host of educational and technical training initiatives for production personnel, engineering students, specifiers, owners and end users.

As Wingert points out, the interest earned from this endowment will be invested annually in initiatives that will have a direct benefit to NPCA member companies in the following key areas: workforce development; growing precast markets through education; precast education of specifiers, owners and end users; and expanding education of architectural and engineering students.

At the NPCA annual convention in St. Louis in November, the foundation voted to fund three grants totaling $135,000. In its largest-ever grant, the foundation will provide $100,000 over a period of four years to the Concrete Industry Management (CIM) Program. CIM sets up four-year programs to train college students in a construction management program with an emphasis on concrete.

The CIM program provides students the opportunity to enter a field that has an urgent need for professionals with the skills to meet the growing demands of a progressive, changing concrete industry. And while the CIM grant focuses on the concrete industry as a whole, the foundation also pledged $25,000 to help fund a training video that precast concrete manufacturers can use to attract people to the precast industry. Additionally, the foundation will help fund educational courses at MCPX (the Manufactured Concrete Products Exhibition) with a $10,000 grant. The grant will cover costs associated with the development of the PQS II course first offered in Orlando.

To further grow precast markets through education, the NPCA Board of Directors plans to develop a precast-specific marketing course and materials for advanced marketing instruction for member companies, and promote the use of quality precast concrete at AASHTO, APWA, WEF, NLAA and NOWRA trade shows. The board will also underwrite grants to support new and innovative precast technology or markets that benefit NPCA members and create strategic partnerships with concrete-related organizations to promote the use of high-quality precast concrete.

NPCA will also develop a portable education program for engineers on the use of high-quality precast concrete that offers participants continuing education credits (CEUs) and create a “Train-the-Trainer” program to provide expanded PQS and safety training outreach to regional locations and the plant floor.

Also on NPCA’s plate is expansion of the mentoring program for facilities seeking to improve plant quality control procedures and of its Production and Quality School to additional sites (and offer courses in both English and Spanish). The foundation created new annual $2,500 scholarships for college-level juniors, seniors and graduate students in precast concrete-related courses of study.

To take its scholarship program and educational efforts to the next level, NPCA will develop curriculum for a college-level, precast-specific course that could be taught at multiple institutions and provide additional scholarship opportunities for students in two-year technical degree programs or NPCA-sponsored technical courses.

Raising the bar
Don Humphrey, vice president and general manager of Central Precast Concrete in Livermore, Calif., served on the foundation’s board for three years, and Central’s parent company, U.S. Concrete, recently made a $100,000 pledge to the cause. Humphrey expects the expanded educational focus to reach into untapped areas, such as workforce development, and to further strengthen the bond between the Educational Foundation and NCPA.

“We’re going to see more teamwork occurring at that level,” says Wingert. “The Educational Foundation will be the fundraising arm that receives requests for funding from the NPCA Board of Directors to establish exactly where that funding will go. The NPCA board will be intimately involved in the prioritizing and in how we need to develop and grow our industry.”

Fred Schultz, president at Concrete Technologies Worldwide in Green Bay, Wis., concurs, and says educating precasters as well as engineers, architects, trade schools and consumers is extremely important in today’s business world. Schultz recently contributed $150,000 to the foundation and feels that the group has done a good job of targeting expenditures at the various venues. “We believe that through a broad range of consistent education, we’ll be able to continue expanding our businesses and supporting our industry,” says Schultz.

But a foundation is only as effective as the people and companies that get behind it, says Wingert, who encourages all NPCA producer and supplier members to do what they can to support this worthy cause. “We’re ready to kick off a fundraising drive in earnest,” he says. “For the foundation to make a difference and to be good for the industry as a whole, it will need all of the support it can get.”

“Those who have the ability to donate, should,” Skinner adds. “It’s important that we all pull together to give the foundation the financial wherewithal to be able to support programs on a long-term basis, rather than depending on short-term fundraising techniques.”

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