Plan now to send your project managers to meet with their peers at the Hilton Downtown Suites in Nashville, TN. We've refined this 2-1/2-day "by demand" seminar to make it even more valuable for your business. Whether your company's project managers are new to the job or among your most experienced employees, they'll learn to manage jobs more efficiently, predict and solve problems before they arise, minimize expensive, last-minute changes, and keep your customers' projects running smoothly and on-time.

We're also devoting the last half-day of the seminar to what we've named Project Aloha—concentrating on the successful wrap-up of projects and setting the stage for future work. We're bringing together experts in the areas of shipping, installation, and punchlists, and an expert in facilitating the process of getting paid for your work—because project management doesn't end when the finished fixtures leave your plant. Consider the collection process alone: Highly profitable companies get paid markedly faster than typical manufacturing companies. Why? What are they doing differently? Our experts will tell you how they manage even the collection process for better results and happier clients.

We're particularly pleased that Kathi Becker, an industry consultant and speaker who has worked with store fixture manufacturers for more than 12 years, is keynoting the seminar this year. Ms. Becker's keynote session—"Did I Just Commit to That?"— will address the intricacies of the verbal contract, suggest ways to manage commitments to achieve successful project completion, and offer methods to get the right action at the right time from others.

To make it easy for attendees to recognize the real-world applications of sessions, a single sample fixture project will be used throughout the seminar for group work sessions, demonstrations, skills practice, and team exercises. Through this project, we'll take a comprehensive look at the five basic components of a project, broken down into 18 functions—Pre-award (sales contact, estimating, bid/pricing agreement, project award); Post-award (project kick-off meeting, design/engineering, purchasing, resource allocation/cost allocation, awarding sub-contracts, scheduling); Manufacturing Process (manufacturing, finishing, assembly, packaging); Installation (shipping, installing); and Closure (project closure, post-project sales, and service). In short, a project from start to finish—nothing left out.

We hope to see you—or your project managers—in Nashville. In light of current events, we at NASFM believe that it's even more important to provide opportunities for members of our industry to gather together.