The National Property Management Association (NPMA) held its Annual NPMA NES Conference in Chicago last week.
This year’s NPMA NES conference was a great success on many levels. The real value of this event is the fact that it is the National Education Seminar and brings together the entire property management community and NPMA members from across the country. The professionals that attended are preparing and educating themselves for a future with increased regulation and new technologies.
Here are my Top 5 Takeaways from the NPMA NES Conference:
DCMA’s focus on IUID
As always NPMA NES is host to great educational sessions. One worth noting was DCMA’s focus on IUID, types of IUID transactions, IUID reporting requirements for contractors and changes to DFARS 252.211-7007. It’s great to see DCMA taking an educational role in IUID and the impact on contractors.
Deltek and A2B Tracking Partnership
A2B Tracking’s partnership announcement with Deltek was extremely well received. A2B Tracking will now offer enhanced Asset Management functionality for Costpoint users who need advanced barcode and RFID technology. Deltek Costpoint users will now be able to track inventory 30x faster than a manual process and improve the accuracy of their government property and inventory to 99% or greater – along with being able to support sustained audit readiness and full compliance to FAR 52.245-1.
Impact of Audit Readiness
A2B Tracking hosted a number of educational sessions that were all well attended. Audits always draw an audience and the session that Pat Jacklets and l delivered on the Impact of Audit Readiness in 2018 filled the room. Our perspective on what it means from a technology perspective was balanced by another concurrent session going on during that time by Ernst and Young (EY) down the hall which provided the auditors’ perspective.
DCMA Audits
Speaking of audits. Property Managers and the companies they support are starting to feel a different kind of heat beyond DCMA. They’re seeing much more activity from their program customers who want to perform audits on their equipment and (ready for this?) want to come to their sites to see 100% of their GFP. The programs don’t seem to be accepting the sampling approach that DCMA accepts for performing property and equipment audits and that has contractors scrambling to be ready for these hugely time consuming audits.
RFID Technology
RFID was also on the mind of many of the conference attendees. The knowledge of RFID spanned the gamut from the newbies in the room, just learning the concepts of the technology, to the more advanced property managers who had some direct experience with using the technology. Sharrieff Christmas delivered a session that had a Q&A going well beyond the end of the allotted time. Questions ranged from specifics on RFID tag performance and expected “read ranges” to how this technology would work in secure military environments.
Bonus Takeaway…
Chicago never fails as a great venue for these kinds of conferences. This past week stirred the debate among us conference goers between the best deep dish pizza in the region.
Are you a Giordano’s or Lou Malnati’s fan?
I know I have my opinion. Best part of that debate is having to do the taste test so I’ll let you be the judge!
