From the CMPA Associate Chairperson (Issue 112)
Impact of the pandemic on Associate Members.
JASON RUDGE, Manager of Major Accounts Quarry and Aggregates for William Adams (founding Associate Member of the CMPA).
This financial year has not been without its challenges. It has been encouraging to see that despite the obvious, the extractive industry has maintained reasonable demand which in turn has seen Associate businesses continue to remain busy.
The second half of the year has thrown some logistical challenges to say the least but the respect and understanding that both Associates and Voting Members have shown toward each other through this pandemic is exactly the reason this industry remains strong. The ability for all to adapt and refocus our businesses has been nothing short of remarkable and goes a long way to showing the strong relationship within the CMPA of its Voting members and Preferred Suppliers.
Throughout this next financial year, it will be imperative for Associates to support our Voting members by continuing to be both innovative and competitive. In return we hope that our Voting members are focused on supporting the Preferred Suppliers where practical.
The Associate Members continue to sponsor and attend the various Field Training programs run by the CMPA in the regional areas. Due to circumstance in the second half of the year we experienced a switch to “Virtual” or “Web” sessions. These sessions maintained good attendance levels and remained both topical and informative. This continues to provide excellent although different interaction and business opportunities amongst the various attendees. Moving forward we will consider using a mixture of face to face and Web based workshops in the new “COVID normal” world we will be living in.
The Associate Members continue to provide technical and commercial articles in the Sand & Stone magazine for the benefit of the large reader base from various walks of the industry.
The increasing presence of the CMPA on LinkedIn has also provided the Association an excellent platform for media release and articles of interest. This area has seen a significant growthin recent times and will continue.
The interactive CMPA website continues to progress. There is still plenty of scope for the website to improve and become front of mind for our members.
Inclusion of location maps for both the Preferred Suppliers and our member’s businesses will be a step in the right direction. The functionality to pay for membership subscriptions, advertising, training material and participating in field workshops online will get better.
The Preferred Supplier & General Information Reference Manual which is a very informative source of the Associates product and service offerings is a popular booklet with the operations team of the Voting Members. It however remains the responsibility of the Associates to highlight their presence in the booklet during their site visits to facilitate in-the-group product sourcing.
I would like to formally thank the non-committee members who attended the meetings for their constructive participation at the meetings, efforts in addressing issues, good ideas in progressing our purpose and providing a good think tank to represent the views and expectations of all Associate Members.
I would also like to record my personal thanks to each and every member of the CMPA Management Committee and the Associates Committee in working cohesively on the issues that were jointly tackled towards a common goal and making the role of Associate Chairperson a pleasurable one.
I look forward to representing the Associate Members for a second – three year term as CMPA Associate Chairperson.
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