June 2018

46 47 AT A GLANCE AMERICAN COMPOSITES MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION WHAT: The world’s largest trade association serving the composites industry WHERE: Arlington, Virginia WEBSITE: www.acmanet.org The ACMA has a staff of 24 who are responsible for executing all the programs in the Association’s four areas of focus: education and communica- tion, market intelligence, advocacy, and market penetration. Dobbins explains: “We have people who are out developing and helping to promote our Certified Composite Technician program; we have people who are putting together the pro- gramming for our trade show that we do jointly with the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering, and for our conferences; they’re producing our magazine and newsletters and websites; we have staff who are experts in working on Capitol Hill; we have people who are experts in working with federal agencies on com- plex regulatory issues and science around some of the chemicals that we’re using; and then, we have experts in market growth and development. They do OEM visits and workshops; they organize trade shows for architects and corrosion engi- AMERICAN COMPOSITES MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATION neers and bridge engineers. They’re doing mar- keting outreach to publications and social media to reach design professionals and help them understand the advantages of composites.” Regarding the penetration into new markets, Dobbins believes that there are two areas that “are about to explode. The first is automotive,” he reports. “We have tremendous interest from the OEMs in terms of using composites to make vehicles lighter, safer, and more resilient.We talk to OEMs that really want to accelerate their move to composites and do it even faster than Ford did in moving to aluminum.” In fact, this past April, the ACMA sponsored a technology day at the Ford Automobile Company - some 40 composites com- panies exhibited their products and gave presen- tations for several hundred Ford engineers and its senior leadership team. Dobbins believes that, eventually, instead of composites being an add-on to automobiles,