News Detail

Achieving Excellence

2/1/2022

The ACI tagline—Always advancing—is powerful. It conveys optimism and challenges us to focus our compass heading on the horizon. Those of us active in ACI know that we rise to that challenge. We walk our talk and endeavor to always advance. Despite our strengths, however, we have an Achilles’ heel when it comes to moving quickly. Since we’re a consensus-based professional organization and are deliberately detached from commercial activity, our work product is often slow to reach the market. The development of codes, standards, and other knowledge-related documents—ACI’s primary output—takes time. Many parties must weigh in and all voices must be heard. On top of that, ACI seeks to maintain global leadership in many diverse areas of our industry: materials, design, construction, and academia. This diffuses our effort, making it difficult to move rapidly.

The solution? The Center of Excellence concept. Last year, ACI introduced NEx—our first-ever Center of Excellence. In conjunction with Aramco Americas, our Founding Sustaining Member, a mission was developed for NEx that surgically targets the use of nonmetallic construction products. Unlike ACI, NEx will not be producing consensus-based documents, but rather will work with the industry to advance the proper use of nonmetallic materials in areas where they bring value. NEx will drive global awareness, education, research, and technology adoption for these materials. It is inherently nimble and more focused than ACI, and these strategic differences will allow it to create rapid progress.

The underlying business structure for NEx is simple. It’s a legally separate entity funded by its members, but still under the ACI umbrella. Although ACI will guide NEx, its independent structure frees it from ACI operational policies and bylaws. This fundamental difference allows NEx to chart its own path forward. With Jerzy Zemajtis as its new Executive Director, it will have full-time staff and operate under its own bylaws and policies. Documents, guides, and certification programs developed by NEx may become ACI products only if subjected to ACI’s consensus review protocols. All of us in ACI leadership have high hopes for the promise that NEx represents.

And the promise extends far beyond this first Center of Excellence. The NEx template is already being used to create our second Center of Excellence for Carbon-Neutral Concrete, which will be announced soon. As most of you know, sustainability is an important, sometimes incendiary, and nearly always confusing issue. It’s full of passion, misunderstanding, and twisted facts. However, one fact that is not twisted is that our industry is responsible for nearly 10% of the entire global carbon footprint. That’s right, nearly 10% of all excess global carbon emissions come from the concrete industry. And if you believe, as I do, that achieving a carbon-neutral world is critically important for our planet’s future, it’s a statistic that cries for action. ACI leadership is aware of this and working to confront it. Creating a Center of Excellence for Carbon-Neutral Concrete will be a major step forward, allowing us to bring under one roof many disparate activities and organize them in synergistic ways. It will also become a resource for objective sustainability information, which will be of enormous help to designers and specifiers. Speaking from personal experience, a designer in today’s environment tasked with creating carbon reductions in his or her designs is at the mercy of conflicting sources of information. A new ACI Center of Excellence will help resolve that.

Given the success of the Center of Excellence concept, where do we go after the Center of Excellence for Carbon-Neutral Concrete? Directly into a third one. Next in line will be a Center of Excellence for Advancing Construction Productivity. ACI is already at work developing a constructability training program—one of the action items developed by the Productivity Task Group that I recently chaired. Improved constructability of design is key to improving jobsite productivity, and the introduction of this ACI training program will be an important step forward. Beyond that, a Center of Excellence focused on improving construction productivity will become a permanent home for activities related to confronting this challenge.

Achieving excellence is never easy. But the ACI Center of Excellence concept will target efforts toward important objectives, making the achievement of excellence just a bit more rapid and likely.

Cary S. Kopczynski

ACI President