De Vos, Broome want to bridge generation gap

These are challenging times for trade associations, and the Society of Plastics Engineers is no exception.

People think you can find anything on the Internet, for free — including even technical information about plastics. Young people seem to be glued to their smartphones. How do you get them to come to a technical conference or trade show?

SPE members are talking about these issues, as the society holds its annual technical extravaganza, Antec, this week in Orlando, collocated with NPE 2015. This marks the second NPE/Antec joint effort, after the kickoff at the 2012 NPE.

Antec is every year. NPE, organized by the Society of the Plastics Industry Inc., runs every three years.

SPE CEO Willem De Vos uses the word “tremendous” to describe the relationship.

“We're looking at doing more and more things together, with SPI,” he said.

How does SPE, built on technical papers, events and volunteer activism, respond to the challenges? How does it face the future? The questions are critical for SPE, which has about 15,000 members today — half as much as in 2000.

But it's even broader than SPE: The plastics industry, and indeed, all of U.S. manufacturing, are scrambling to get young people interested and involved, as the baby-boom generation begins to retire. SPE, SPI, and a growing number of plastics processors are reaching down into high schools, or even middle schools, to promote the industry.

Bethel, Conn.-based SPE named De Vos as its CEO in January of 2012. He brings an international perspective, and a processor's viewpoint, to the society. De Vos was CEO of Vitalo Group, a global thermoformer and packaging producer based in Belgium.

“We are still a not-for-profit, but the business practices we are doing today have changed dramatically in the last three years, since I came on board,” De Vos said. “We are operating more like a normal company, where deadlines have to be kept. Where targets are set. Where measurements are done. Where the quality of the service and the products that you have is very important.”

Russell Broome became SPE's managing director last fall. Broome also has global business experience, at materials companies LNP Engineering Plastics, GE Plastics and PolyOne Corp. He was an engineer handling purchasing at TE Connectivity just before joining SPE.

Both De Vos and Broome are in their 40s — and they can connect both with young people and the older SPE veteran.

Broome, 43, has volunteered for SPE functions for 20 years. He served as SPE president for the 2011-2012 year. Broome started as a student member while in college, and he is a leading advocate for bringing young people to plastics.

Plastics Race

Students and young professionals once again will be able to get into the Plastics Race on March 25, and compete for prizes. The scavenger-hunt-style event will take participants onto the NPE show floor where they will visit exhibitor booths to answer questions.

The following day, students can find out about jobs and internships during a Speed Interview session.

Wim De Vos is 45 — at least through Antec and NPE. His birthday is March 28 — the Saturday after NPE concludes.

One of De Vos' major goals was revamping SPE's website, with elements of social media. SPE this week will announce a free “e-membership” allowing some access to its new professional networking site: the chain.4spe.org. Current paying members will now be designated as Premium Members, and will continue to get full access, as well as discounted attendance at seminars and conferences.

De Vos and Broome sat down with senior reporter Bill Bregar last month at the Plastics News Executive Forum in Lake Las Vegas, Nev.

 Q: To start Wim, you have emphasized the need to add value to an SPE membership. What do you mean by that? Also the priorities seem to have changed from globalization a few years ago, to now, the emphasis on finding new young people for the plastics industry.

De Vos: Let me make a quite clear statement on everything which is international. When I joined SPE three years ago — and this is the reason why they picked me, as a non-American and someone who had a lot of global experience. Because at that point, the main thing that SPE thought was our problem — because we had lost a lot of members — as the fact that SPE missed what I call the boat of the globalization.

Today I'm clearly saying that this was and is not the problem of SPE. Three years ago we thought, if we go global it's going to solve all our problems. Today I'm saying, very clearly, no! Do we have to continue our global efforts? Yes. But I am, with the complete team, refocusing on the United States.

Because we have found that globalization is not the problem of SPE. The problem of SPE is bringing value to its members. Specifically to its American members. We have lost members because of the Internet. Because of the fact that people have less time. Because of the fact that the plastics industry is so mature that people are looking into niches.

Q: That's really interesting. I remember work was flooding to China, and that seemed to push the calls for SPE to become globalized too.

De Vos: And it still is important. So perhaps in 2011 and 2012, internationalization was the number one priority of SPE. Today, for me it is very clearly maybe the number four or five priority. The number one priority of SPE is to bring value to its members. And the value that we used to bring, to our members, has been made void by the Internet. I mean 20, 25 years ago, you had to be a member of a society to have access to a network, and to have access to the newest technical information.

Today, the network is on the Internet and the newest technical information is also on the Internet.

So what we're developing today with all these new products and all these new things, is again, to bring value. It is to give something to our members that they cannot find elsewhere. And this is the number one priority for SPE.

And there are a couple of other products which we are preparing, that we will bring as a very high value to our members in the next couple of months.

Q: Let's talk about the next generation of plastics engineers, employees and leaders. It seems like young people just want to communicate online. Russ, is that true? What is your take?

Broome: I think face-to-face collaboration will start to return itself, when the economy picks up and folks are able to start going to conferences and be a part of things more. And the restrictions are lifted. I think that the value of that face to face will be apparent, when it's been vacant for a while now.

They've relied so much on electronic and digital and virtual that I think the appreciation for face to face is starting to come back a little bit.

Q: You've said that older and younger people each bring different strengths.

Broome: What we're doing is trying to link the next generation with the retiring generation. So if you're going to blend these two groups — and they both want to mentor each other — you have to be willing to adapt. The older guys have to be willing to pick up a smartphone. Likewise, the younger guys have to be willing to meet face to face. So we think by blending those two cultures together you're going to see more virtual stuff as well as more value on the face to face.

Q: Let's talk about the Plastics Race. This was a big success at last year's Antec in Las Vegas, organized by Jaime Gomez and a group of SPE members. They looked for clues on the Vegas Strip. How is the race different now that Antec is in an NPE year?

Broome: We're doing a lot of networking with, especially college students. The Plastics Race is the perfect example. The reason behind that is to get the college students interacting with industry.

It was so successful the first time in Vegas that we've taken it up a notch, and now we're running with a hundred boots on the NPE floor. Instead of the Vegas Strip, they're running the scavenger hunt on the floor of NPE. And there's an app on the smartphone where they'll be scanning QR codes instead of doing it all on paper. At 10 o'clock on Tuesday morning, they start scanning QR codes in booths. And it'll pop up a question on their phone that a team of four will have to collaborate and work with the people in that booth to have to answer the question.

De Vos: People in the participating booths can decide on their question. So you can decide on the question that will be asked when they scan your QR code on your booth. So they have to interact with you or with your people, on the booth.

Broome: That's an example of using the new technology and it has to have face to face interaction at the booth.

Q: OK, Wim tell us about the SPE website. You are launching The Chain as a social media site.

De Vos: The Chain is an online communication discussion collaboration platform. You have to consider it a little bit as a LinkedIn. However, we were not 100 percent satisfied with LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn has a lot of advertisement. You just become a member, and everybody can post whatever they want.

So what we did is something a bit different. First of all, the name, The Chain comes from the polymer chain. Basically what you will see at Antec, is a green fellow walking around. His name is Linky. He makes the link. He's one of the links in the chain. And he will be main feature at our booth, also. So we will have some green people walking around.

You know, we see all these young people networking in different way than we are. So we said let's try to come up with something that could be a professional networking system for the younger people. Rather than them discussing on Facebook what kind of drink they have, or rather than on LinkedIn, someone posting his resume and say hey guys I'm looking for a job, we have in this system split out everything different places.

Q: Walk us through it.

De Vos: The main place is called Tech Talk. Now, Tech Talk is a moderated platform — and the name “moderated” is very important here — where you can have technical discussions.

Q: So can I do this, as a non-member?

De Vos: Yes, and no. You need to simply have a login. Once you create your login, you can access. Anyone can log on but not get the entire platform.

So then we have the SPE Café. You should consider it as more a little bit as the Facebook. Where people can simply chat with each other about anything they like. So of course, this is not moderated. You want discuss, “Hey are you going to that conference? Yeah, I will be there as well. Let's get together for dinner.” Or something like that, you can do it here.

Then we have Leadership Lane. Leadership Lane is only for the leaders of the society. You know we have about 100 chapters, about 70 regional chapters and 30 technical divisions And every board or committee of our chapters will have its own “closed” place to communicate and store data. It's a nice central location.

And then the other place is Career Central. Which is basically everything related to jobs. So you want to post your resume? Post it there. You're looking to hire someone, as a company? Post it there. So with this, we are absorbing what LinkedIn is doing.

We believe that in the future the number of ‘places' will be growing. As an example if there are many discussions on a certain topic, let's take composites, we will then create a ‘Tech Talk Composites' and so on.

So we are splitting it out. People who only want real technical discussions go to here (He clicks on the site on his laptop). And this is what is moderated.

Q: The Chain went live on Jan. 6, right?

De Vos: Yes. And in the first eight weeks' time, about 3,000 people signed up.

Q: Wim, earlier you mentioned changes going on at SPE. Can you give us some more insights?

De Vos: I will be a little bit black and white in this statement. When I joined the society, I found a society which hadn‘t changed in 25 years. It was my job to tell the people in the leadership — guys, we need to catch up, with all the things which have happened. They realized that globalization was one of the things they needed to do, that's why they attracted me, who is a non-American to do that.

But everything which was linked to the Internet. I mean we had a completely outdated website. We almost didn't do anything. If you look now, for instance, in the last couple of years. The website is mobile responsive, easy to navigate and searchable, with all data stored in one location. The Chain, also has a mobile app. You can communicate in The Chain through an app. So on your mobile device you can do that. But not only that, we have our magazine, Plastics Engineering, in an app. So you can read everything on the plane because everything is loaded in your smartphone or in your tablet.

We have an events app, where basically all our conferences are on there. All the papers and the presentations can be found, and the people presenting them.

Change needed to happen. And this change is on all the levels. It's on the service provided to our members. It's on the service we provide internally to our groups. It's on the governance structure, which we're still working on. I mean, we were like the Titanic! And we still are a big boat. I mean, today the wind is changing every day so you need to be able to adapt the ship. If you're on the Titanic you're just moving in one direction. And these are things that we have changed considerably, and we continue to change.

Broome: You have to adapt to the changing needs of your customers.

Q: I know that all trade associations face difficult challenges.

De Vos: At the end of the ‘90s SPE had about 35,000 members. It went down to below 14,000 and today we are somewhere around 15,000. So we have been able to stop the decrease in membership in the last couple of years. We have a small growth. And we expect a much bigger growth in the next couple of years, because of all of the things we are doing are now really coming on stream.

Q: Does SPE still want to get all its technical papers and conference presentations online?

De Vos: We are still in the process of finalizing that. If you go do on our technical library, it is all fully searchable. You put in the word. For instance, you search “composites.” (He clicks the icon on his laptop). And there are 907 papers in there with the word composites in it. It goes back to 1996. All these papers have been loaded in one central place, and you can see them, by topic.

Q: That's pretty ambitious. Is it “done” yet?

De Vos: No it's never going to be “done,” because we have, every year, 40 conferences around the world. And we are uploading all these papers and all these presentations six months after the conference. This is only available to members.

Q: One major announcement at Antec will be creation of member categories of Premium and E-Members. Can you explain?

De Vos: Well, it's linked to The Chain, because we want people like you, and everybody else in the world, to participate in The Chain. Because of this, we will have a new member type which is an E-Member. The E-Membership will be free. With limited benefits.

Broome: E-Members won't have access to the technical library. But they'll have access to The Chain, and by seeing through these technical discussions, it may prompt them to become a premium member. But it opens up the collaboration.

De Vos: We're trying to address what we talked about when we started this conversation, that a lot of things are free online. So the first step that SPE is taking today, is to have an E-Membership, which is free. So that at least, the people who join, for free, start to see all the things we have to offer. A limited number of things they will already have access to, for free.

Our current members will be called Premium Members. So these Premium members will have discounts at conferences, they will receive Plastics Engineering magazine, in print and online. For Premium Members, the average discount at a conference is $100. Our membership price, depending if you do early bird, it's between $109 and $129 dollars. So that means one discount on one conference and your membership is paid. They have access to the member directory. They have access to the technical library. And there are a couple of other benefits which they will only be getting as a Premium Member.

We will see how this evolves in the future.

Q: Tell us about the thinking and planning behind these moves.

De Vos: In the end, we're not copying, but we're looking at business models like Facebook and LinkedIn. They are also for free. These people live from other revenues. So we'll have to see in the far future ahead how this evolves for us. But our mission is to support the industry with knowledge on new technologies, on new materials on new innovations. And for the less amount of money we can do this, the better. If in the future we will be able to do this all for free, we will do it. But we need to make sure that our operational costs are covering by some income stream. In the past this has always been membership dues.

Q: Wow that is a pretty bold statement. But I know you have said that membership dues have changed as a percent of the total SPE budget.

De Vos: I'm not sure about this statement, but I would guess that 25 years ago, membership dues were between 60 and 70 percent of the society's income. Today membership dues are less than 40 percent of our income. I could see this evolving towards zero. Maybe in the next decade.

Q: If it was zero, where would the money come from?

De Vos: Well, if you look to LinkedIn and Facebook, they also have no membership dues. They make money on advertising, they have a lot of other revenue sources.

Q: Now let's turn to Russ. It's interesting that you began as a student member. Why did you want to take the SPE job?

Broome: I've had a passion for SPE since I was a student, and I always found it a challenge when I was in the corporate world, and volunteering for SPE, that I never got to spend enough time that I wanted to for SPE. And then I had rose through the ranks at the society, did my year as president, and I had to go off and decompress for a year-and-a-half or so. And I actually started missing the camaraderie and everything that goes along with SPE.

And when Gail Bristol's retirement came up, just a few months after that, it all clicked. Why couldn't I do this, and be able to spend 100 percent of my time on SPE, where my passion is, instead of a job and volunteering for SPE. So I saw it as an opportunity to do 100 percent of my time where my passion was.

What Wim has been able to do for the society in taking it to more of a business operating outlook, that made the job even more interesting. Because if it was the old association, I probably wouldn't have made that move. But I saw SPE moving in the direction that I wanted to be in.

Q: Russ and Wim, talk about some of the things SPE is doing to interest young people.

De Vos: We are completely revamping the PlastiVan program. We used to have one teacher. We now have three. We're looking to expand that. We're looking to have five, six, seven teachers all over the U.S., meaning we could do five times more with the PlastiVan than we could do last year or two years ago. This is geared toward middle school and high school.

Broome: It all goes back to us trying to benefit the industry. If we can get kids interested in working in our industry at that age, then we have their attention when they're getting ready to make the college decision.

And that's another big focus: I'm building efforts around freshmen scholarships. Traditionally — and that's another thing of change — SPE has provided scholarships for kids that are already in college, to reward students that are in plastics programs and doing well. Our renewed focus is, let's go after more kids in the programs to start with. So a renewed focus is going to be made on freshmen scholarships, to actually get them from high school into a plastics education. It's a renewed focus from SPE to address the workforce shortage that you hear so much about every day. And the whole idea is, at the end of the day, we need more people entering our industry, into plastics and manufacturing.

Q: How would the new scholarships work?

Broome: We have that core group of universities that have the plastics programs, and we're going to work with them and other partners to get seed money to offer scholarships specifically to graduating high school seniors, to get them into these programs.

It's how you tie in the PlastiVan. We already have a vehicle talking to those kids and their parents of the kids who are having to make a decision of what college do I go to? What am I going to study?

Q: Let's end with the globalization of plastics, and of SPE as well.

Broome: We're actively participating with PAL, the Plastics Association Leaders, which I think [SPI CEO] Bill Carteaux put together. It's all the plastic associations. The leaders come together and talk about issues, talk about strategies and how we can help each other.

De Vos: Our mission is very similar between SPE and SPI, because in the end we both support the industry.

Q: What about groups outside of North America?

De Vos: Let's start by talking about partnerships. We both have started to work more and more with other SPI-type of associations around the world. For instance, we have started now to talk with Plastics Europe, which is the counterpart of the American Chemistry Council and SPI in Europe. We're going to have the first event together — which is a plastics and polymers innovation award — for all of Europe. And we will start supporting each other's events from now on.

We also support GPCA — the Gulf Petrochemicals and Chemical Association — in the Middle East. We held the first Antec in Dubai last year. They support our conference. We support their conference. And we're currently exploring how to do more, together.

These are only a few examples of partnerships that we're trying to make around the world.

Q: And in 2013, SPE held a Polyolefin Plastics Arabia conference in Oman. That was SPE's first conference in the Middle East. And you held a pair of two-day events in China.

De Vos: Yes. We started doing more Antecs outside of the U.S. So there's an Antec planned in Brussels in Sept. 8-9 of 2015. There will be a new Antec in Dubai on January of 2016. That's the second one in Dubai.

Q: And of course, India is important for SPE. SPE's president for 2013-2014 is Vijay Boolani, from India. The society held its first Antec in India in 2012.

De Vos: We're going to do another Antec in India, in Mumbai, in 2016.

Q: Well, thanks a lot Wim and Russ. Do you want to make any closing remarks?

De Vos: SPE needs to make sure that we remain relevant for our industry. And to remain relevant. Again, number one is to make sure that people find value in what you give them. And the number two is that you are more relevant if you are a global organization than if you are a regional organization.

So being international does still play a role. But if you have nothing to offer, and you're global, you're going to die. If you have a lot to offer and you're regional, you'll survive.