Total Solutions Plus, Day One.

This week I will be reporting from beautiful Phoenix, AZ on the Total Solutions Plus Meetings and Trade Show. This is the group meetings for all 4 of the major ceramic tile industry associations, TCNA, CTDA, NTCA, and CTEF.

Monday was devoted to the ANSI Committee meeting, the ISO Tag meeting, and the MMSA Meeting.
The ANSI meeting discussed 5 ballot issues for new standards and the status for each issue - several have already passed but several are going to need review and re-balloting due to pending negative votes. This is the way that a consensus ballot works, we must deal with the negative votes so that the standard is acceptable to all groups that participate.
We then had 4 new submissions received and discussed, 3 of which were submitted by the MMSA committee.
We finished the ANSI meeting with reports from 3 Ad-Hoc Committees that have been and will continue to study various issues that possibly may become ballot issues.

We then moved into the ISO TAG group meeting and had reports on the 7 current working groups.
Working group 1 - addresses tile testing methods
Working group 2 - addresses tile specifications
Working group 3 - addresses installation materials
Working group 4 - addresses thin tile issues
Working group 5 - addresses proposed backer board standards
Working group 6 - addresses installation methods and issues
Working group 7 - addresses sustainability issues

These 7 working groups all gave reports on the status of their committees and discussed next weeks expected issues at the full ISO TC-189 meeting in London, UK.

Next were discussions on two potential new working groups addressing:
A. Anti-microbial test methods proposals
B. Next generation of test methods and criteria for adhesives.

Finally we discussed the status of all of the ISO TC-189 projects underway.

The final meeting of the day was for the MMSA - (The Material & Methods Standards Association). This is one of the main groups to develop potential new standards for our industry, focusing mainly on installation materials and methods.

Our first order of business was to re-elect our current slate of officers for another 3 year term as all have been working very hard and accomplishing much for the organization and industry. Thanks to all 5 of the officers for their efforts.

We then had 10 committee reports on various projects underway that again may develop into future standards or test projects that will improve our industry.

Next we discussed pending old business including updating and producing product bulletins and the MMSA website. WWW.mmsa.wa

Under New Business we discussed a presentation being made to the TSP audience on Thursday as well as forming a new working committee to address Gypsum Self leveling products.

Tomorrow will be another full day with reports on more technical committee meetings as well as other committee meetings for TCNA, NTCA and CTDA. Closing out tomorrow is the Board of Directors meeting for CTEF.

See you tomorrow with yet another report and update from TSP.

Steve