Welcome you to the 2022 Armstrong World Industries Investor Day. My name is Theresa Womble. Most of you in the room probably know me. I'm the director of investor relations here. I'd also like to introduce Dan Haldeman, who's our manager of investor relations in the back of the room. At any time during the day, if you have questions on logistics, just find one of us, either of us and we'll help you out, or anybody with an Armstrong name tag can also help. We'll have Q&A at the end of the presentation. Before we get started, I'll do the typical housekeeping of our safe harbor statement. We'll be using forward-looking statements today, and we will make no obligation to update those. Standard procedure there. If we go next to the basis of presentation, explains the way we'll be talking about various metrics in the presentation. Looking at our agenda, we're excited to have not only Vic and Brian speak about our strategy and our financials, but we will be also having Mark Hershey, Nick Taraborelli, and Jill Crager to talk about our segments, our value drivers, and our growth initiatives of Innovation, Healthy Spaces, and Digital. We'll have a break about halfway through, and then, as I said, we'll start the Q&A session at the end, and we'll follow that with demonstrations of our initiatives. With that, I'll turn it over to Vic. Thank you, Theresa. Morning, everyone. Well, welcome to our campus here. We're delighted to have you here live and in person. For those that are joining us virtually, we're also delighted for you to have joined us as well. I thought before I start this morning, it was fair to acknowledge that maybe this isn't the most important thing going on in the world right now, given the events in the Ukraine. We have a lot of ex-colleagues in that part of the world. We have a lot of friends, so maybe you do as well. As acknowledgement of what's going on in the world, I thought it was fair to put this into perspective. With that said and that acknowledgement, we're happy that you're here. It's exciting times at Armstrong, and we're excited to share with you what we've been working on. We were just talking with some of you. It's been three years ago, 2018, the last time we had an Investor Day and we had you together on campus. We were two years into our separation from the flooring division as a standalone pure play ceilings and specialty walls company. We were in an agreement to sell our international division to Knauf, and we were excited about the prospects of becoming a more focused, a more capable, and a more valuable company in the Americas market here. We've been busy since 2018, and we're excited you're here. We're excited to share with you what we've been working on and what that means for us on where we go next. I'm really excited for everybody to get to meet more of my team as well. I'm very fortunate to have a talented and experienced leadership team, and everybody on this executive leadership team has been with me, except for one, through the whole journey. I feel very fortunate. Again, I'm thrilled that you get to hear from them today. You're gonna hear from Mark Hershey, who is leading both of our P&Ls, our segments, Mineral Fiber and Architectural Specialties. He's relatively new to the role, but he's not new to the company. He's been with us for 11 years. You're gonna hear from Jill Crager, who has been responsible for building the digital initiatives that you're gonna hear about from her today. Again, relatively new to the position, but not new to the company. Jill's been with us for over 23 years. You're gonna hear from Nick Taraborelli, who is responsible for the Healthy Spaces platform and has been building out this platform, and an exciting platform. You're gonna hear more about that today. Again, Nick, relatively new to position, but not new to the company. He's been with the company for 20 years now. Now, I know when you look at Nick, you're gonna say, "There is no way he could be with the company." He started just out of junior high school, okay? I'm really pleased with this leadership team, and I think you're gonna find at the end of this morning's session why I have so much confidence in this leadership team and why this is the right leadership team to take us to the next level. Again, we've been very busy really focusing on this Americas market, and we are poised and positioned to accelerate once again our value creation. What you're gonna hear today from this team is we've created a uniquely focused building products company built on what is arguably the strongest set of fundamentals in the building product space. With that focus since over the last few years, we've taken a strong position, and we've made it stronger. Our ability to win in the market and compete in the market is even stronger today than it was just a few years ago. With this this enhanced ability to compete, we've not only strengthened the value drivers that you've come accustomed to with Armstrong, but it's gonna sustain these value drivers into the future. We're really confident about that, and we're happy to share with you how we're doing that. Then finally, what you're gonna hear today, we have secular tailwinds in the market, from the marketplace in addition to these growth initiatives that we've been investing in over the last couple of years that's gonna add this new dimension of growth for us, and that's our Mineral Fiber volume. Let's just level set where we are as an Americas-based company and a focused company. We are the undisputed leader in the ceilings and especially wall category. With over 2,800 employees in the North and the Americas market, we have 15 plants around the country. We have an unparalleled footprint to service this customer base. As we reported last week, we just crossed over $1.1 billion in sales with over $372 million of EBITDA. This is one of the highest EBITDA margins in all of building products. We're very proud of that. These sales make up, are made up of two segments, our Mineral Fiber segment, which is the bulk of the ceilings category. As you know, we've had a large share in this market. We've had over a 50% share for 30+ years now, and it's a 40% EBITDA segment for us. Our second segment is our Architectural Specialties segment. It's the fastest-growing part of our business. In fact we've done 8 acquisitions in that segment over the last five-plus years, and we've taken it from $100 million to nearly $300 million over that period of time. We're really excited about the combination of both a very successful industry-leading Mineral Fiber business complemented by a specialties business that makes our competitive advantage even greater. As you all know, we're a 160-year-old-plus. We're one of the oldest American companies that remains. You get to be one of the oldest companies because you're adaptable as a culture and as a company, but also because the work that you do is relevant. It's relevant to the world. That really gets at our purpose, our why, as we call it, on why we are relevant in what we do in the marketplace, and that is we make a positive difference in the spaces where we live, work, learn, heal, and play. Ceilings matter when it comes to that positive difference. It matters a lot to our customers, and therefore it matters a lot to us. At the heart of this really is the growing need for sustainable solutions. Sustainability is really at the heart of what we do. You think about sustainability is about making a positive difference broadly for all of our stakeholders. It fits very nicely and very naturally for what Armstrong is about in the marketplace and what we're doing. It's very easily integrated into our business strategy. Our approach is we've taken the sustainability platform and divided it into three pillars. We have pillar leaders, and we have pillar teams now around people, planet, and product. We've now set goals, and we've set targets for 2030 that are good business. It's good for our customers, it's gonna be good for our shareholders, and again, it's gonna be good for our business. At the end of this trail here to 2030, what we're gonna find is that Armstrong is a more resilient company as a result of these sustainability goals. I think it's important to call out the category in which we play is very attractive. Even relative to other building products categories, this is an attractive category. It's highly consolidated, with really three main players in this, and the same three players for decades. It has a large installed base because there hasn't been a disruptive technology, in particular to mineral fiber, for many years. The installed base is a very consistent installed base that drives an annuity of renovation activity. It makes us a very stable, steady category. It's a highly specified product, and I like to differentiate specifications here because there's generic specifications that you often find in building products, and then there's very specific specifications. Because architects really care about what goes in the ceiling because it has a large impact on the functionality of the space. Because they care, they specify specifically manufacturer and product number. That really helps us through the value chain all the way to installation. With the growing need around indoor Healthy Spaces, this category of ceilings, because they matter in the creation of healthy indoor spaces, is becoming even more relevant. Now, why are we uniquely positioned to win? I get this question a lot. Why are you able to hold the margins that you hold in this space and have for so many years? It's because of the winning formula that we have and we've ingrained over the years. When you are the leader for over three decades in this space and you do it really well, you develop a lot of credibility, and that shows up in the brand strength that we have. It's one of the most trusted brands in building products, and it's certainly the most trusted brand in the ceilings category. Now, with our Architectural Specialties building out, we have the broadest, most innovative product offering to our customer base. It makes us more relevant to the specification community, and it's the easiest to do business with in the contractor community. As they like to say, they have one throat to choke. You know, winning the specifications is a really important part of our core competency. We think that they are very important to drive innovation and new solutions into the marketplace, so we cater to them. We innovate to them. Winning the specifications there is key to holding prices through the value chain and holding your position all the way through. It's one of the things we do really, really well, and it's again, it's a key success factor for us to holding our margins. At the end of the day, if you don't have operational excellence, you can't hold your specification. They'll flip the spec or they'll find a way around it. Having the best quality and the best service is really important to the winning formula. We are unmatched in the marketplace with our service and our quality. Again, we've been busy over the last five years really driving a more focused, more capable organization. Again, back to 2016 when we separated from our flooring business, we became a pure play, focused ceilings, especially wall company. In 2017, we entered our agreement to sell the best of our international business to Knauf so that we could create this laser-like focus on the Americas market. We closed on that deal in 2019, and if you remember, we gave the majority of those proceeds back to our investors through an ASR. In 2020, we made a very important decision in the depth of the pandemic. We said we had been rightsizing our organization for an Americas-only company. We had gotten our SG&A in line with that focus. In 2020, we said we weren't gonna furlough our people, we were gonna maintain the strength and the capacity of the organization, and that we were gonna continue the investments we had begun in these growth initiatives and again, in 2020 and throughout 2021. We're very proud of the progress that we're making. You're gonna hear more about that progress from Mark, Jill, and Nick in just a few minutes. I wanna take you back to where the last time that we were together in 2018, and again, what we had acknowledged in 2018, for those that were here, and you'll remember this, is that we had the highest margins in the building products space. We were generating more cash flow per revenue dollar than any other building products company at the time. We had an opportunity to focus on this Americas market where we had the strongest market position and the highest return on investment. The missing piece for a company, the gem of a company that we had, was profitable top-line growth. We set out to say, "Listen, that's the one missing piece we wanna add over the next few years." We laid out these four strategic imperatives to be, to lay the groundwork for us to be able to change the trajectory of our top-line growth. We said we had to revitalize our Mineral Fiber category through innovation. You've heard us talk about this in our investor calls over the last three-plus years. We launched Total Acoustics, we launched Sustain, DESIGNFlex, ACOUSTIBuilt, and now, most recently, AirAssure for the Healthy Spaces. We drove our product vitality index from 28% to 40%. 40% of our sales today are coming from products that we introduced in the last five years. We have accomplished the revitalization of the Mineral Fiber category that we set out to do there. By the way, that is the driver behind the AUV increase on the mix side of the equation that we've been talking about. We said we wanted to accelerate Architectural Specialties, and we do that both organically and inorganically. Since 2018, we've added 5 acquisitions, and we've nearly added $100 million worth of growth in that part of the business. We were just embarking on our digital transformation, and we were excited about that. We were telling you about that. From the plant floor all the way to the customer's office, we saw opportunities to transform our business through digital technology. We're really happy with the Kanopi platform. We launched it a little over a year ago. Jill's gonna tell you about the traction that we're getting there. ProjectWorks, the way we're automating the design process to drive more efficiencies with the architects. For what reason? To further strengthen our ability to win the specification game. We said we wanted to continue the strong cash generation that this business has been accustomed to through a balanced capital allocation. We've averaged over 20% free cash flow margin. Again, that's one of the best in the building products, and we're very proud of that, and we're committed to that. We've also spent $250 million on our second priority after investing back in the business on acquisitions. We've had enough cash to return $650 million back to our shareholders. Again, very proud of that. A lot of checks here. We really did what we said we wanted to do back in 2018 over the last 3 years. Ultimately, what our objective was the changing the trajectory of the top-line growth. After a decade of 2% growth up until separation from flooring, we changed the trajectory to 6%, and that's absorbing the pandemic and the recession that was caused by the pandemic. Now we're ready to do it again. Against the backdrop of favorable tailwinds from the marketplace and the growth initiatives that we're excited to share with you more about today, we have an opportunity to do it again. Let me start with the positive backdrop that we're seeing now for the next few years. It really starts with an economic recovery from the pandemic recession. We've said from the beginning that this recovery was not gonna be a V shape. In the commercial construction area, this was gonna be much more like a swoosh. What you've heard me report over the last year or so, even that swoosh part has gotten really choppy as we've worked through supply chain issues and labor issues on the job sites that have really slowed down parts of the recovery. The market is recovering. The bidding activity that I've been reporting on for the last 9 months is clear indications, and they're at double-digit levels, that the work is out there, that there's pent-up demand for renovation activity. When you think about getting back to 2019 levels, and I look at that bidding activity level, I have confidence we're not only gonna get back to 2019 levels, we're gonna blow by 2019 levels. Just to put that in perspective, from where we are, we finished in 2021 to get back to 2019 levels, that's a $100 million sales tailwind for the company. In addition to that, this focus on safety and indoor environmental quality is here to stay. You're gonna hear more from Nick on this, but it's here to stay. It's changing the conversation around how buildings or interior spaces are designed and the materials that are going into those spaces. It's a real catalyst for renovation activity. Again, we're excited about that impact or the impact on that in terms of Mineral Fiber volume growth. Now, connected to the money being spent on indoor healthy spaces and education is the social equality that was that came to the forefront and really stepped up the funding that's going into education. As many of you will have recalled, what we've talked about for the last 8-10 years around why isn't the commercial recovery been stronger, one of the reasons that you've heard me say again and again is that the funding for healthcare and education hasn't been there. Although office has been recovering since 2014 and 2015, healthcare and education has lagged, and that has really muted the overall recovery. Well, the spending in education right now, which is $190 billion over the next three years, is a step change in funding for the education sector. Again, that's a very nice catalyst, again, for the company around Mineral Fiber volume. Finally, the growing demand in ESG around the need for more sustainable solutions. Companies are setting goals they're gonna have to meet on embodied carbon. Cities are setting goals around emissions for their buildings. New York City has the most aggressive, with an 80% reduction in emissions, really targeting the buildings which generate 40% of carbon emissions in the country. We're just getting started with the need for more sustainable solutions. To meet these goals, companies are gonna have to do something different in their spaces to achieve these goals, another catalyst for Mineral Fiber volume growth. Against that backdrop, which is very positive and frankly very different than what we've been talking about, what we've experienced in the last five years, are these industry-leading growth initiatives that we're excited to share more about again today that we've been investing in since 2019. You're gonna hear Mark and Nick and Jill talk about these, but the innovation is the great enabler to these initiatives. You'll hear Mark talk about that, the Healthy Spaces and then the digital platforms on their impact on Mineral Fiber volume growth in particular. I hope what you hear when we talk about these initiatives is the additive nature of these initiatives into all what we're already doing around AUV and Architectural Specialties growth. The mineral fiber volume part of this is really what's new, and you'll be listening for that, I'm sure. Together with the positive tailwinds from the market and these growth initiatives, we're ready to do it again. After a decade of 2% growth to the separation from our flooring business, we accelerate to 6% over the last five years. We're ready to do it again to 12% over the next five years. Let's pause there, and let's get into some of the initiatives and the building blocks that are behind this change in trajectory. I'm gonna turn it over to Mark Hershey. Thank you. Thanks, Vic. Good morning, everybody. I'm Mark Hershey, and I'm proud and excited to have this opportunity to speak with you about our two operating segments, Mineral Fiber and Architectural Specialties. Proud to represent the dedicated and talented employees in these businesses. Excited to share with you the opportunities we have ahead of us. These are two strong businesses. They are truly complementary, and frankly, they're powerful together. My remarks today will focus on three themes. First, that together these segments offer a total value proposition that, as Vic said, is unmatched in the industry. When we say total value proposition, what we mean is the breadth of our product portfolio, the range of our design capabilities, the strength of our customer service offerings, the scale and the reach of our channels, including distribution, and the power and the reputation of our brand. You'll hear that these segments, these powerful segments, are now supported by, as Vic previewed, investments in initiatives and enablers that support how we win. When we think about how we win at Armstrong, it's definitely specifications, but it's not just being specified. It's becoming the basis of design to architects and designers. In addition, accelerating the rate of renovation, actually stimulating the market to create renovation events. You'll hear about these three initiatives today. You'll hear also that these initiatives improve not just each of our segments, but the entire AWI enterprise for growth and driving and supporting the value creation drivers that Vic mentioned, AUV performance, profitable AS growth, and Mineral Fiber volume growth. Let me start with an overview of our two segments, starting with Mineral Fiber. Mineral Fiber represents roughly 75% of our total revenues at these very attractive EBITDA margins. While it is a lower growth business, it is a steady and strong cash generator. That steady performance comes from the hallmarks of this business, AUV performance and manufacturing productivity. I'll touch on that in a minute. Mineral Fiber sales are split relatively evenly, balanced among new, major renovation, and repair project types. This is important. It makes it less impacted by economic cyclicality. Turning to AS. AS now represents roughly 25% of our total sales. While its margins are lower than Mineral Fiber, this is a high-growth business. This is a growth story, multidimensional growth story. Sales in AS are split relatively evenly between new and major renovation. It has virtually no repair, replacement, or flow business. Stepping back and looking at both segments now by verticals. Both segments serve a diverse range of vertical markets. This is also important. We're often viewed as heavily weighted toward the office environment, when in fact, education, healthcare, and transportation are very important to us. Because both businesses heavily serve new and major renovation business project types, this means the architect and the designer is essential. This is really where the power of the combination of the two segments comes together, focusing on what the architecture and design community is looking for today and in the future. Both segments have their own key hallmarks or attributes. I mentioned AUV performance. On the Mineral Fiber side, it's certainly manufacturing productivity. Year in and year out, our plants, our operations teams deliver this productivity by driving lean and operational improvements, reducing waste, reducing cost, reducing scrap directly to the bottom line. On the AS side, design is and has become the hallmark of this business. Design through different categories, segments, if you will, inside of AS. Substrates, styles, shapes, colors, whatever the ambition or aspiration of a designer. We're only getting started here, frankly, in this very fragmented space of the market. Vic mentioned the winning formula, and for those of you who followed us for some time, you probably heard this from us before. It's important. It is what it differentiates us from competition, and it is a unique value proposition for us. If there's one thing that stands out between us and our competition, it is this formula. At the center of it is what we call the total customer experience. It took me a long time to learn this one. It's the total customer experience. We don't have one customer. We've got multiple customers. It certainly starts with the architect and the designer, and they're looking for design and specification optionality, flexibility. It continues into our channels. Distributors are looking for ordering and fulfillment flexibility and ease and reliability. It continues to the contractors, especially these days, who are looking for labor savings, ease of installation, time savings. It certainly impacts the building owner, the facility manager, who is looking for value, a return on their investment, getting people back to the office. Last but not least, it certainly impacts the end user occupant customer. That's all of us in the spaces we live, work, learn, heal, and play in. How does the space feel to you? How does it look? How does it sound? And these days, more than ever, what's the air quality? How well is it lit? It's very important for us at both segment levels to embrace all of these customer stakeholders. Nobody's better positioned to address all of their needs, frankly, exceed their needs, than Armstrong. The segments do this by working together. It is the power of the broadest portfolio that leads to specification leadership, relying on the foundational strengths of our company in operations, in channels, and our brand. Here's an example of our winning formula at work and the power of the complementary nature of our segments. We sell more products into more spaces by doing one thing really well, which is solving for complexity. Put simply, ceilings are complicated, and they're getting more complicated. We solve for that complexity by complementary offerings, by complementary strengths. Here's an example. The reflective ceiling plan on the left side of this page is an example of the complexity inside a ceilings project. It's what architects, designers, contractors face into when they're building. We embrace that complexity, quite frankly. The ceiling, the way we think about it's the capstone of a space. It's where it all comes together. It's where your walls meet, it's where your lighting is integrated, it's where your HVAC is integrated, these days, sensors and security, all in one plan. We embrace that complexity just as we did in this project for a school in Memphis, Tennessee. It's a school. You're looking at two pictures of a library here. The bid, the specification was for a high-performance mineral fiber solution, but also specialty products. We won the project with our WOODWORKS offering, we won the project with a high-performance mineral fiber solution, and we won the project with the best grid in the industry, which comes from our WAVE joint venture. A bundled integrated offering that allows us to preserve, actually grow our AUV for the project. Here's another example, and another benefit of the winning formula and the power of the combination. Repeat opportunities, customer loyalty. Yes, this is the same school. Yes, it's the same architect. Four new spaces. In this case, you're looking at a cafeteria, a fitness center, and two hallways. Again, a specification for a range of options. Again, high-performance mineral fiber, which we bid our Lyra product. Our Lyra product is a plant-based Sustain portfolio mineral fiber product that brought over four times the average unit value for our mineral fiber products in general. The fitness center you see is an open plenum space. We don't fear the open plenum. There is complexity in the open plenum. You can't see them very well, but our INVISACOUSTICS mineral fiber solution is in this fitness center because open plenum has an acoustics problem. That's where the complexity arises. Again, the power of the total portfolio. Solutions from Architectural Specialties, high-performance Mineral Fiber, all supported by suspension and grid from WAVE. 2 different projects, 1 school customer, 1 architect, 5 spaces, 1 supplier, Armstrong. Our segments, they share the winning formula, and that winning formula has delivered the financial results that Vic described to you earlier, over the last several years. We're now gonna take it to another level. We're gonna strengthen that winning formula, reinforce it, and invest in it. You'll hear about our innovation, Healthy Spaces, and digital initiatives today. I'll start with innovation, Nick will cover Healthy Spaces, and Jill will cover digital. In all of these cases, with all of these investments, they've been designed to achieve the outcomes you see on the right side of this page, the value creation drivers for our company. Let me start with innovation. Innovation is not a department, it's not a function, it's not a singular team. For us, it is a mindset inside our company, and a growing one across the enterprise. I'll focus on an example of innovation today that's focused on products, R&D, new product development, to address emerging market needs, market trends as they're coming, and frankly, anticipating where they're going to be in the future. With Healthy Spaces, given the role of the ceiling, given our leadership in the ceiling space, we know we have a role to play in bringing indoor environmental quality to all spaces. Digital, serving latent demand with channels and tools, frankly, technology that doesn't exist in the industry, and we don't believe is contemplated by any of our competition. In all cases, these initiatives have in common their ability to drive and secure specifications and AUV. Okay, starting with innovation in, as one example, R&D. Research and development, new product development, multigenerational product planning has been a core competency since Thomas Armstrong founded this company over 160 years ago, quite frankly. We do this by leveraging some of the best, if not the best talent in the industry. Our organization and our competencies and where we focused are the key. Today, more than 10% of our salaried workforce is directly focused on innovation in product and product development innovation. In many cases, our leaders are actually the industry-recognized experts for codes, testing protocols, and standards. We're gonna continue on this journey. Móz, Arktura, and Turf in 2020 were a great example of us taking a different approach to innovation. A few minutes on, what I call the plus factor that originated out of these acquisitions. In each of these cases, the strategic rationale for buying these companies was about more than their great products. They make beautiful products, and they've got great production capabilities. It was more than that. It was about how they think. Frankly, these were the first acquisitions we've done where we were not buying the company from a retiring or legacy or passive owner or investor. We were buying innovation leadership, different ways of thinking, different ways of creating, challenging the norms. What's the next great sub-substrate going to be? Where should we go? What do architects really want? We're the architect's architect. In these three acquisitions alone, we acquired more than three times the total number of architects and interior designers we had in the whole of AWI at the time in these three small acquisitions, complementing the great talent and great design leadership we already have in industrial design and industrial engineering. A very powerful combination. It's already showing itself. We're building new ways of thinking, we're collaborating differently, and we're creating new structures. New structures like innovation labs that excel at agile and fast sprints. A venture studio, our first foray into corporate venture capital we've never had before. Really excited about where this is going, really excited about the opportunity to share. I'm confident we're gonna be talking to you about the outcomes and the innovation from these structures in the future. Vic mentioned our product vitality index. It's one of the metrics we look at as we invest in innovation. He mentioned nearly 40% last year of our product sales in Mineral Fiber came from product launches in the last 5 years. In the pandemic years alone, these last 2 years, we launched more than 2 times the number of product families and solutions as at any time in our history. Importantly, all of this innovation, all of the focus is on what the customer needs, what the customer wants, where's the customer going. That's market-driven innovation. That's what gives us confidence that we will succeed. It's done in an agile way, fast, fail fast, succeed fast, and it's always focused on specification outcomes, highly specified outcomes from our innovation. Again, not just getting specified. We're very fortunate to get specified very frequently. When can we raise our specification strength? We rate and grade every specification we get on a scale to monitor how our specification strength is improving over time. With specification strength comes confidence that we can hold, grow our average unit value like we've done. For us, it's fairly axiomatic. If we consistently invest in our innovation, if we consistently invest in our new product development, we will consistently grow our AUV performance as we've shown. Here are some examples, and Vic mentioned a couple of these. Innovation does differentiate us, and here are some. Here are four examples of innovation journeys that we've embarked on just in the last several years, building on our history of strength in competencies like aesthetics, fire, and acoustics. Starting with Total Acoustics in 2015, we were focused on the acoustical performance of our products in spaces, certainly on the sound absorption in these spaces, the NRC, noise reduction coefficient. At the time, the voice of the customer, the market was looking for more. They wanted speech clarity within a space, that's the NRC. In this day and age, they wanted more. They wanted speech privacy between spaces. That's CAC, that ceiling attenuation class. We launched Total Acoustics, blending the best of both, literally allowing an architect to dial in the acoustical performance in a room, in rooms side by side. Nobody has a portfolio of broader high NRC and high CAC solutions than we do at up to 2 times our average mineral fiber AUV. Same model, same kind of journey for Sustain, ACOUSTIBuilt, and DESIGNFlex. Just to say it, Sustain was the industry's first portfolio of mineral fiber solutions that consisted of entirely Red List free products and inputs. No chemicals of concern in our Sustain portfolio, up to 4 times our average mineral fiber AUV. ACOUSTIBuilt is the monolithic, seamless, looks like drywall solution, but it carries our Total Acoustics properties at up to 6 times our average mineral fiber AUV. DESIGNFlex was the industry's first portfolio, first platform of offerings, mineral fiber offerings in shapes, sizes, and colors at up to 7 times. These journeys, this historical performance is what gives us confidence for the future, innovating for the future. We will go on similar journeys just like these, focusing on putting the power of our focus on new areas, certainly Healthy Spaces, certainly sustainability. Installation efficiencies is enormous, particularly in the grid space, and certainly always design trends. What's the market looking for? This is across our portfolio, so certainly in our WAVE joint venture, inside all of the categories within AS and Mineral Fiber. Our initiatives are designed to drive and continue consistently deliver this AUV performance, but as Vic said, we're also focused on Mineral Fiber volume growth. As we look at the leading indicators for new construction, major renovation, repair, we believe they provide a favorable outlook, favorable backdrop for Mineral Fiber volume growth. We're not resting on the market, and we're taking matters into our own hands, and these initiatives have been designed to squarely focus on the prize on the left, and that prize is the 38 billion sq ft of latent demand. The orange and the red slices at the bottom of this pie are not a mistake. They represent the annual market for new and major renovation. To put the prize in perspective, if we're able to influence, activate 1% of this pie to us with our leadership position, it represents $250 million of top-line opportunity. Turning to AS. This is a, as I said, a multidimensional growth story. We are both building this business, but we're also scaling this business. Nearly $300 million of sales last year, and that's an impressive story. To put it into perspective, AS was born inside of Armstrong roughly 20 years ago by a few leaders who were focused squarely on the ceilings business and the ceilings industry who knew, and they were right, that we could differentiate ourselves by offering a broader portfolio of solutions, strengthening our specifications. By 2002, they'd started Architectural Specialties focused on sourcing metal tiles, standard metal tiles from Europe, and their business reached about $2 million. 15 years later, the AS became an operating segment for AWI, and we surpassed $100 million in sales. An additional three years later, they surpassed $200 million in sales, and now two years later, $300 million. The journey will continue. We will continue to penetrate these categories. You see them sliced here. Metal, wood, felt, gypsum or whatever comes next, whatever the A&D community is looking for. Leveraging the winning formula, our channels, our brands, and our operational strength, driving EBITDA margins north of 20% by next year. Here is a great example of synergies from acquisition, building and scaling a business. This is our metal category. It's an example of our vision for all of the categories inside of AS. This category has now surpassed $100 million of sales alone by itself. It is the product of five complementary acquisitions dating back to 2011. In 2011, we bought a small metal fabricator in Montreal. It did roughly $10 million of business. Now, in our hands, in our portfolio, complementing Mineral Fiber, it does well north of $30 million of business, and this segment continues to grow. We're adding capabilities, we're adding products, we're scaling, we're optimizing a footprint, we're growing it north of 20% with margins north of 20%. It's a terrific story. The metal finishing you see on the side here represents finishes from our Móz's acquisition in 2020. Again, growing the product category, bringing finishing, a competency, a capability to the rest of our metal portfolio. Our business development team will continue to look to add these kinds of capabilities and solutions to this category and all of the categories. As Vic mentioned in the earnings call last week, we're open for business and M&A. Our pipeline grows, our database of opportunity grows, but we're looking for more than M&A. In somewhat of a shift for us, we're also looking for partnerships, alliances, and ventures with a very open mindset, open architecture approach to scaling these businesses with speed and agility in a very less capital-intensive way. Always focused on what the voice of the customer is saying. What are the market trends? What are the market needs? For business development, perhaps no market need has more of our attention today than Healthy Spaces. We believe in our hands, the role of the ceiling, we've got a big role to play and a big opportunity. Nick Taraborelli leads that for us, and I'll turn it over to Nick to tell you more about it. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. All right, my name is Nick Taraborelli. I manage our Healthy Spaces initiative here at Armstrong. I'm gonna go through reasons to believe today, reasons to believe why healthy spaces can be a step change growth opportunity for Armstrong. This is what we'll go through. I'll take you through the trends. The healthy spaces trends we're seeing in the market, this is a trend that's here to stay. It's not a new trend. I'm gonna show you how it's accelerating. We're gonna go through the contribution, how ceilings contribute to a healthier space, and in particular, indoor environmental quality, and then we'll get into the financials. Just some trend data here we'll start off with. You can see the trend, the dotted green line towards healthy spaces. Owners have been requesting healthy spaces prior to COVID hitting the market. You can see the solid green line there. Healthy building trend actually accelerated the slope of the green line, actually, when COVID hit. That 2-year period, you saw the acceleration there. Something like 90% of owners now are desiring a healthy space. On the right here, we talk about the macro trends. This one really shows the acceleration. If you're familiar with the WELL Building Institute. The WELL Building Institute, they've been in existence for 12 years. In the first 10 years, they certified 1 billion sq ft of healthy spaces. Over the last 2 years, they certified another 2 billion sq ft. A total of 3 billion sq ft. That's a significant acceleration in the number of WELL healthy certified buildings out there. Work from home is a big trend. I'll show you some more data that I have on that, but it looks like it's moving to this hybrid model, where people are gonna work from home part of the time, and they're gonna work in the office part of the time. The square feet per worker, 25% increase in the square feet per worker. That's spreading people out. If you had been in this room 3 years ago, there would have been a ton of chairs, and everybody would have been packed in. Look where we're at now. Everybody is spread out. There's at least 6 feet of social distancing out there, and that's gonna be the norm. It's not gonna just be the norm in a presentation room like this, but it's gonna be the norm in open plan office. That's a trend that helps our business. The federal stimulus that Vic mentioned. $190 billion that's gonna be spent through 2024 on the education segment. Some tailwinds that we have at our back here are some trends that are really gonna help our business and help us accelerate the replacement rate for ceilings. Healthy Spaces is really needed in all spaces, but I'll just focus on healthcare, office, and education here. What's happening in the healthcare market? Well, healthcare is looking for more flexible spaces. When you look at three different epidemics or three different parts of this COVID variant that came about, when you had three different variants here, there was almost three different surges that happened, and they need more flexible spaces in healthcare. That could be something like converting a storage area into a different acuity level. If there's a surge, we can move people into other parts of the hospital. The way you move people into other parts of the hospital, they have to be healthy spaces. They might have to be a pressurized space, a space that controls pathogens, and our ceilings help you do that in healthcare. In the office environment, right now, all of these employers are trying to get people back to work. One way to get people back to work is offering a more healthier environment for them to work in, something that has more amenity spaces, something that has more collaboration spaces. In education, everything I'm hearing from the education segment is they don't wanna go virtual again, and I don't want my kids to go virtual again. We don't need them at home. They're better off at school. When you think about what a healthy school looks like, a healthy school has clean air, and we have a number of healthy space solutions for the education segment. All wins for us. The whole changing design environment is a great trend for Armstrong in accelerating ceiling replacement. I get asked this question a lot here. What's gonna happen to the installed base of office if everybody works from home? Now, I don't believe everybody's going to be working from home in the future, but what's gonna happen? Here's how I see this playing out. In 2019, about 5% of the office workforce worked from home, and there was about 200 sq ft per worker. You can see, as you move up that blue line, if you go out to 2024 with the yellow dot here, you can see if 25% of the workforce is working from home. It goes from 5 all the way up to 25%. As long as the square feet per worker increases, which we believe it will, we believe it'll increase 25% from 200 to 250 sq ft, you actually maintain the installed base. But what we actually believe will happen, and if you look at the chart on the right here, this is a standard new office, healthy office design, 315 sq ft per worker. Look at this chart. If you go out to 300 sq ft, the installed base per office actually increases. There is a net gain in office square footage by increasing the square feet per worker. That's a positive, a very positive impact on our business and the amount of Healthy Spaces ceilings that we would sell into the office environment. Next, I'm just gonna go into why the ceilings. You know, you might be thinking to yourself, "Well, what's the ceiling have to do with a healthy space?" We went out, and we talked to organizations like the World Health Organization. We talked to Harvard. We looked at what the International WELL Building Institute was saying. We actually hired a strategic advisor, Joe Allen. He's the director of Harvard's Healthy Buildings Program. He founded 9 Foundations, which are the 9 Foundations of a Healthy Building. We went out, and we took all this criteria. We learned everything we could about the market, and then we defined what a healthy space is, what a healthy space would look like and the contribution of the ceiling on indoor environmental quality. Things like light and sound and air and temperature. These are all elements of a healthy space where the ceiling can really contribute. If you think about light and sound, we've been playing in those areas. Lighting integration's all about the ceiling. Sound, we've been selling acoustics for many years. Air and temperature are somewhat new to us, and that's where we need to invest our innovation dollars. Let me give you an example here of investing in innovation dollars to get air quality out of a ceiling. One of the big competitors out here to our new ceiling-based VidaShield air cleaning units are floor cleaning units, okay? If you can imagine a floor cleaning unit that's gone into a number of classrooms, there's a floor cleaning unit, and it's sitting right up here on the floor. This floor air cleaning unit is pulling all the air in this room to this spot right here. If somebody's sick in the back of the room, the air's getting pulled there. It's getting pulled across everybody in this room. You don't want your son or daughter sitting right here at this desk because all the air is getting pulled right there to them, potentially contaminated air. What you want is a ceiling-based unit. All the air is getting pulled up. If you look at this graphic here, all the air in a ceiling-based unit gets pulled up and away from everybody. We worked with JB&B, a Manhattan mechanical engineering firm, to do an analysis on this whole situation. How does a ceiling-based unit compare to a floor-based unit? They found that there's actually a 14% less exposure risk to a virus or a pathogen when it's a ceiling-based unit. When you just take two VidaShield units, you put them in a classroom, there's a 22% less exposure risk. You're healthier and safer with these units in your spaces. Just an example here, one example of how Armstrong solutions deliver a healthier space. Now I'll get into some recent wins to really show you how these products are being used today out in healthier spaces. First project here, Florida Charter Schools. Florida Charter Schools, Southern Florida, they have over 40 school buildings. They bought VidaShield for every single school building. They're in every, almost every classroom, two units per classroom. Here's a quote from a facility manager there. It's all about knowing, not only knowing the air is being cleaned, but able to see something in the works. The parents feel a lot more comfortable when they walk into a classroom, you look at that picture there, and they can see the unit in the ceiling that's actually doing something. There's a lot more comfort in that. You have the education segment where we're selling our solutions. I'll give you an example of the office environment here, CMD Office. This is a lobby in CMD Office in Irvine, California. They wanted better air quality, they needed better acoustics, and they needed better lighting. Our ceiling solution met all of those needs in this space. Think about this space. This is a space at the lobby. People are in and out of this space all day. They're worried about the air quality. Our units are in there cleaning the air. Encompass Medical, another one. It's in the healthcare environment. This is an interesting one. This space was designed for pressurization. Healthcare spaces are designed for pressurization because they're worried about pathogens going in and out of the room. There might be a slight positive pressure or a negative pressure. In this case, it was positive pressure. Space was designed at positive pressure, and the pressure alarms kept going off. This facility had to make a choice. They could then make a very expensive HVAC investment, or they could install our AirAssure ceiling. The only thing they did in this space was change out the ceiling. They put in our AirAssure ceiling. The pressure alarm stopped going off. The AirAssure ceiling is a sealed ceiling plane. There's gaskets on the sides of the panels. Sealed ceiling plane, alarm stopped going off. Think about accelerating the replacement rate. Think about what Mark talked about, 38 billion sq ft of ceilings out in the world. Okay? This was a perfectly good ceiling in this healthcare facility. Perfectly good, absorbing sound. They replaced it with an AirAssure ceiling. They took out the old ceilings, they put in the new ceilings. That's what accelerating renovation is. It's a big opportunity for us. Next, we'll just talk about the financials here. Healthy Spaces benefits us in two ways. When you think about accelerating renovation, that typical reno rate goes up anywhere from 50-75 basis points. It's anywhere from a $200-$350 million opportunity there. Just moving to Healthy Spaces and looking for some of those solutions that I talked about. There's a volume play here, but there's also an AUV play. That health, that Health Zone AirAssure ceiling sells for 2x what a typical ceiling sells for. If we can get the market to take out the old ceiling and put in the new ceiling, we're selling that new ceiling for 2x. If they add the AirAssure air cleaning units to that space, it's 4x AUV. All these classrooms, all these healthcare, all these environments that we're working on today, they're pulling out old ceilings. They're putting in our new AirAssure ceiling at 2x, then they put in two AirAssure units or VidaShield units, 4x AUV. Big opportunity here, and this just shows where we're going with this. The key is ceilings, Armstrong ceilings, become a critical part of indoor environmental quality, and that's how we're gonna get there. Just to sum up here, the trend is real. There's a renovation renaissance going on right now towards healthier spaces. Ceilings are a critical piece of a healthy space. Things I talked about, like air quality, acoustics, and lighting. When you think about Armstrong's brand, our experience in the market, our financial strength, we have the right to win in this space, and we're gonna win. Real quick here, I'm going to be doing tours later on of our living lab space. We have three different tours going on after the question and answer session. You can ask me questions about the space, and I'm gonna just talk about all the different design elements that were put in place there with a number of different partners. Thank you. We're gonna take a 10-minute break, so we'll be back at 10:10 to finish the rest of the formal presentations. Exits to the rear. Thank you very much. Our presentation now with our Senior Vice President of Sales Operations, Jill Crager. Good morning. I'm Jill Crager, and I'm really excited this morning to talk to you about our digital initiatives. We think about our digital initiatives as strategic enablers, supporting winning the specification in more markets and accelerating the renovation rate, driving both top and bottom-line growth. What I'm gonna talk with you this morning about is how we're reaching those underserved and undertapped markets and accelerating the renovation rate, driving growth. I'm gonna talk with you about how we're winning the specification and driving average unit value. Also gonna talk with you mixed in is just how we're using our digital initiatives for speed and productivity, helping us to scale as we grow. We think about our portfolio as balanced, looking across optimization opportunities, step change initiatives, and our goal for an industry disruptor. When we think about these optimization opportunities, they're focused both externally on our customer and internally on our foundation. When we think about the customer, it's focused on cost to serve and speed in the eyes of our customer. These are the initiatives that we're working on at any one time, really furthering entangling us with our customer and also offering our second to none customer experience. Our three-step changes are our digital initiatives that are driving our growth strategy. Today, that's what I'm gonna focus on with you. I'm gonna talk about Kanopi, I'm gonna talk about our Lead Optimization Engine, and I'm gonna talk about ProjectWorks. These are all three digital initiatives that we believe are gonna drive meaningful growth for AWI. Okay. Here we provide a great overview of how these step change initiatives are driving growth for us. The first two I'll discuss help us to get to parts of the market that we don't traditionally influence. Either the opportunity is too small, it's in an underserved geography, or it's just unknown. Kanopi is our digital platform that's focused on the small business owners and facility managers who need support with their dirty, damaged ceiling tiles. Kanopi gives these small business owners and facility managers an easy customer journey, accessing 60% of the untapped repair and renovation model. From demand generation through installation, Kanopi is designed to accelerate renovation rates. Our lead optimization engine enables us to address 60% of the untracked market we previously did not focus on and therefore we were not influencing. We're leveraging machine learning to serve up high-quality leads to our sales team. Serving up these high-quality leads to our sales team allows them to focus more time on solution selling, closing more work, and in doing so, increase our sales efficiency. ProjectWorks is our design service providing fast, accurate drawings, including a bill of materials on all our ceiling solutions and comprehensive installation instructions. This easy-to-use service will support winning more design specifications and will help us drive average unit value in the process. Let's talk about Kanopi. Kanopi is our digital platform supporting small business owners and facility managers who want and need to repair and renovate their ceilings. What we heard in early surveys from facility managers is they actually have the budget to do the renovation and repair, but they choose not to. They deprioritize it because they say it's just too hard. They don't know how much they need to purchase, they don't know what they need to purchase, they don't know where to go to purchase it, what it's gonna cost, and even once they figure that all out, they're not exactly sure how to go about getting it installed. Accessing even 1% of the underserved market with our easy-to-use digital platform will drive significant growth opportunity. We're solving for easy with our end-to-end solution from demand generation through purchasing, fulfillment, and installation. Kanopi will be our low-cost solution to meet the needs for these small business owners and facility managers to expand our reach without adding additional feet on the street. We're leveraging our distribution partners for fulfillment. We're offering a service model that quite honestly customers have come to expect. We're driving micro-marketing campaigns focused on small business owners and their unique personas. We're driving them to Kanopi, and we're landing them on pages that really resonate with their unique experience, whether that's they need an acoustic solution, they just need clean tiles, they have damaged tiles or a healthy space. We're solving for easy with Kanopi installation services, giving small business owners a solution to their installation needs. Our network of certified installers who know our ceilings will help them receive quality installation. With Kanopi, we're able to reach those underserved markets. In 2021, we sold ceilings into 50 states. We also launched Kanopi in early 2021, if you, as you recall. We're really focused on awareness and creating demand. Accordingly, we saw meaningful ramps across number of site visits, number of orders, our average order value, and our sales. I referenced our micro-marketing to different customer personas. As a result, we're seeing sales across many verticals that we do not believe we were previously reaching. We're squarely over that small business owner and their need for that one-stop shopping, our seamless approach from decisioning to purchase to fulfillment and installation. We're reaching those small business owners and facility managers that really need that direct purchase option. They want acoustic solutions. They do want clean, undamaged ceiling tiles. They want a Healthy Spaces, and they just want a way to help them solution for the right tile. We're seeing a significant ramp in our chats. Customers wanna talk to somebody for that final confirmation before they swipe their credit card. We're offering an easy platform that previously did not exist for these small business owners. These personas are examples of some of the verticals that we're reaching. We had a recent win with an engineering firm. Our social media campaign landed in front of them. They realized they needed an acoustic solution. They did some shopping on Kanopi. They ended up on a chat, which turned into actually a live call with our inside support team. Once they were confirmed, they felt they had the right solution for their ceiling, they swiped their card, they purchased the ceiling and our installation service. We truly are offering this one-stop solution from decisioning to purchasing, consulting, in this case, fulfillment and installation. Kanopi's making it easy for these small business owners and facility managers to purchase their ceiling solutions. Looking more closely at our lead optimization engine. With this engine, we're driving the highest quality leads to our sales team. We're using machine learning to ingest multiple data sources. We're building out and qualifying and scoring sales leads and then passing them off to the sales team. These high-quality leads are served up to our sales team, and it's eliminating the need for them to go search for their next opportunity, allowing them more time to spend on solutioning and selling, closing more jobs. Our optimization engine is adding capacity. By eliminating the need to do manual qualification, our inside sales team is now able to focus on that 60% of the untracked market, that small repair and remodel opportunities where we were not previously influencing. We're now able to address all opportunities, not just top opportunities. In 2021, we saw an increase of 50% in the number of leads that our inside sales team were able to process. They're able to close using the optimization engine with these high-score leads. We're able to scale the business without adding additional salespeople. Focusing on the highest score leads also generates an increase in average unit value. We saw 20% for the leads that have flowed through our optimization engine in 2021. Our lead optimization engine is helping us reach that 60% of the untracked market efficiently. We're getting in earlier, we're reaching more customers, and we're closing more work. Ceilings are getting more complex, and we're solving for complexity with ProjectWorks, our third initiative. ProjectWorks is our design service giving our customers one source for all their design needs, from design through pre-construction. We're providing fast, accurate, comprehensive design packages to our customers, enabling them to better estimate and also understand the scope of work. The service is really important as our ceilings are complex, and some of our more complex solutions require some design services. Our bill of materials provides a comprehensive list of exactly what components are needed and exactly how many are required for a successful installation. Our optimization ensures no overestimating, which means accurate bidding and no waste. This service integrates our ceiling solutions into one package, eliminating complexity. We're no longer taking multiple quotes for different types of ceilings in a space. We're combining them all together into one nice, neat package. Our strong design automation tool supporting ProjectWorks allows us to be more productive, providing this service at a speed none of our competitors have today. You're gonna get to see a demo of this later this morning as part of your rotation through the tours this morning as well. With our design automation tool, we're able to service a larger number of projects in significantly less time. In closing, our step changes are supporting our growth strategy by unlocking access to these previously untouched markets for repair and renovation. We're driving productivity, allowing us to influence that 60% of the untracked market that we weren't able to get to before. We're providing a design service that offers speed and accuracy for all our products in both design and pre-construction. We're enabling us to win the specification and drive average unit value. Our power of focus means we are uniquely positioned to tackle the inefficiencies in our markets with our digital tools. We're well ahead of our peers in this area, and this further differentiates us. We're using digital to enable our strategy, bringing meaningful tools to the market to support our growth. I'm really excited about our ramp, our success so far, the progress that we're making, and our roadmap for future support of the strategy for growth. Thank you. With that, I'm gonna turn it over to Brian MacNeal. All right. Good morning. Still morning, right? First, I wanna thank everybody, both on the call who are watching live and who may watch the replay of this, and then especially the folks in the room. It's great to see everybody live again, especially here in the room. A quick thank you to some of the folks behind the scenes that have made this happen. Theresa Womble, Dan, you've met, Hannah, who some of you met at the lobby, and then Meredith, who runs all of our facilities. You'll probably get a chance to meet her, but execution has been awesome. We're not quite done yet. I'm sure many of you who are going on the plant tour will have a great tour. The team over there is very excited. As I step back now and get close to the end, what are the financial implications of what you've heard today, and what you're gonna hear from me. Too far? All right. Chris, let's go back one. There you go. Now it's going forward. There we go. Excellent. Vic teed it up in the very beginning. One of our biggest value creators is AUV, and we're not gonna take our eye off of that. We've in fact strengthened it with some of the initiatives you've heard about. On the AS side, we're gonna continue to find those complementary acquisitions that add capabilities and strengthen that AS business and the Mineral Fiber business, which will help solidify that leadership in that AS space as we continue to penetrate that market. Then third, around capital allocation, a very consistent, clear, capital allocation set of priorities, and that's not changing going forward. AUV, our biggest value creator. You've seen this chart now a couple different times. On that left-hand side, AUV stands for average unit value. In the simplest terms, it's taking the selling price divided by the square feet. It's the combination of getting like for like pricing ahead of inflation and then also mixing up our portfolio. Mark touched on the innovation, the history of innovation, our 40, almost 40% now product vitality. That helps reinforce that mix up opportunity to continue to grow at this level, if not higher. Same thing for like for like pricing. It's not just about inflation. You heard about the winning formula and all the components of that. Not just innovation, but broadening the portfolio, the quality, and more so, even more important now, the service piece. Some of you have heard me tell the story. How do you justify price with service? Well, especially in this day and age with labor tight, getting the right product at the right place at the right time is super critical. Actually, Jill runs the customer service team. Their team's unbelievable at this. We're the only manufacturer that will allow contractors to change what's on a truck within 24 hours of shipping. Now we tell them 24, but they may call 12 or 10, even sometimes less, and we'll make the change. That way, they can manage their working capital and get the right product at the right place at the right time. That's a service, especially right now, that's very valuable and substantiates our pricing activities. That strong AUV on that left-hand side has driven and yielded with the other value creators a nice strong progression in EBITDA and EBITDA margin. We're not done there yet. You'll see in the upcoming slides how we're gonna continue to drive that price and mix productivity and drive that acceleration in the EBITDA growth. That EBITDA growth has led to a very stable and steady and increasing free cash flow. You can see what we've done here on the left is also benchmarked ourselves against our building product peer groups, clearly outperforming them on that left-hand side. Strong free cash flow. Our free cash flow margin is just under 20% this past year, and you'll see in our guidance and our kind of value creation model that we're going to accelerate that free cash flow margin. There's very few companies generating almost 20, if not more,% of sales and converting that into cash. What that allows us to do then is to turn around and have a very balanced capital allocation priorities where we can allocate capital to all of those priorities, and it's not gonna change. You've seen the history on the left-hand side, a nice balance between investing back in the business, buying companies through acquisitions, and then returning cash to shareholders. Very balanced approach, and you'll see here very shortly for those who haven't read ahead, we're upgrading our outlook on free cash flow generation to grow at 15%-20% to continue to fund all those priorities. Real quick, just to state it again, they're not changing. As you look at that first priority of investing back in this business, both in CapEx and in SG&A, we've got a business with an ROIC just under 20 that's now gonna grow above 20. That investment back in this business with the high margins, the high ROIC is our first priority. You've heard a little bit about those investments from Mark, Nick, Jill. We've been investing over the last few years. Then in the CapEx side, we've invested in return-seeking type of investments that drive the productivity in our business at roughly a very consistent 3% year-over-year. Investing back in the business, number one. Number two, you'll see a slight change here. Mark alluded to it also, acquiring companies, mostly in AS. They tend to be small mom and pops, but they help drive capabilities and differentiation in the marketplace. We've expanded that definition slightly to more of a business development definition. It's not just acquisitions, it's partnerships like 9 Foundations that Nick referenced and other partnerships that can help accelerate our digital and Healthy Spaces initiatives. Third, we'll return excess cash to shareholders, both in the form of a dividend and a share repurchase program. Given the great cash generation this business has, we can do all three of these things. You've heard about the investments, and we've always had very consistent value creators around that. AUV, I mentioned, productivity, AS double-digit growth as it penetrates that market. One of those missing pieces has been Mineral Fiber volume growth. Based on the initiatives you heard today, and you're gonna see and experience some of that later on the tour, as we look forward, we see a nice market tailwind, that 1-2 points of mineral fiber volume benefit, and then the initiatives driving another 1-2 points to get us to a 2%-4% volume growth outlook. Now, some will look at that and say, "Well, that's pretty low." When you've been flat to negative, slightly negative for the last 10 years, that's a pretty big step change for us. From a value creation standpoint, that volume falls through at 60% variable margin. I'll talk a little bit more here in a second about some of the investments there and the timing of those, after I go into AS. In Architectural Specialties, I wanna call your attention to the bottom left-hand corner, that box. One of our primary screens, and you've heard, again, Mark talk about this some and Vic and I over the years, one of the screens is how does it complement and strengthen that Mineral Fiber business? It's not a usual screen that people use for acquisitions, but we're very diligent to make sure we understand the strategic rationale for that acquisition and how it can actually help Mineral Fiber. Now, it also tends to help AS too, but it's one of those screens. You can see the other screen, the other screens we use. You know, we're very diligent, I'd say, and rigorous in our process. We did not complete an acquisition last year. We did 3 of them at the height of the pandemic or the start of the pandemic in 2020. We've done 8 over the last 5 years. As you switch to the upper right, you'll see some of the economic returns we're experiencing from those acquisitions. At a time of acquisitions, right around 9x is the purchase price. As we look out 18-24 months, the post synergy multiple is right around 7x. We're getting some nice multiple arbitrage, if you will, from the acquisitions versus how Armstrong's being valued overall. In the bottom right-hand corner is a picture of AS, and how those acquisitions have helped accelerate that growth in AS. As we sit here today, the EBITDA margin sitting at 14%, we're not happy with it. I know Mark's not happy with it, and the team's not happy with it. Over the next two years, 2023, so next year now, we'll get back to that 20%. As we look out further based on that organic growth of double digits or higher, we should see a $500 million business with over a 20% EBITDA margin. As I look back at the investments in SG&A, you can see the purple bars on the left-hand side, this is the absolute dollar spend in SG&A. As we've mentioned, we have been investing there. As you see that increase from 2016 to 2021, some of that is digesting and integrating the acquisitions we've done, and then some of that is the investments we made behind Healthy Spaces, innovation, and digital. We're gonna continue to drive higher spend there behind those, but the inflection point's here. In 2023, we'll start to see the benefits of those investments outstrip the investments we've made and start generating return. As many of you looked at our 2022 guidance that we released a couple weeks ago, there's an implied Mineral Fiber slight margin, EBITDA margin contraction, that's temporary. That's another year of investing behind digital and healthy as they ramp up, and then they start returns in 2023. You can see that baked into our guidance coming up here on the right-hand side. We expect to accelerate net sales from 6% growth to 10%-13% growth. On the EBITDA side, accelerating from 5% growth to 12%-15% growth. Quite a step change in both the top and bottom line as those investments start to now hit those returns. That brings me to our value creation model. As we look out over the next 5 years, we see sales growing 10%-13%, I just touched on, and you can see some of the underlying assumptions. Mineral Fiber volume, 2%-4%. Strengthening AUV, growing at 5%-8%. You heard some of the great opportunities we have to mix up this business through innovation, through project work specifically. Acquisitions will be incremental to this growth. As you move to the flow-through there, we'll continue to get manufacturing productivity, 60% incremental flow-through from the Mineral Fiber volume growth. SG&A as a percentage of sales will come down below 20% as we start to get that return. 20%-plus EBITDA margins in AS, and mineral fiber at 40+. WAVE will continue to grow double digits, very consistent with mineral fiber. As we translate that EBITDA growth into free cash flow, 15%-20% growth in free cash flow. Very stable level of CapEx. Yes, we've moved it up some, but we're seeing some great opportunities to generate returns in our capital spend. Again, that ROIC is sitting at just under 20%, and so it's a good investment to do so, investing back in that CapEx. That's ROIC is gonna grow to over 25%. I appreciate your time today. With that, I'm gonna pass it back to Vic to wrap up. Thanks, Brian. Brian always gets choked up when he's talking about the numbers. Especially, did you notice where he got choked up most on the SG&A page? Yeah. As any good CFO. Let me just put a wrap on this quickly so we can get to Q&A. Again, I know what you heard. I hope that you heard that we have a strong management team, and I'm very proud of this management team. I'm very proud of the organization on how they continue to execute day in and day out. Again, I hope that you experienced that this morning. Again, the other thing I hope you heard is that this business was always been a strong business, but with the power of focus, it's getting a lot stronger. The value drivers that are foundational basically for this business are getting stronger, and it really is the platform for us now to grow from here. You heard from Mark Hershey on innovation, that we're the innovation leader today, and we're being very purposeful about it. We're gonna be the innovation leader going forward. It's the big enabler for us on those value creation drivers, but also for driving Mineral Fiber volume growth next. You heard from Nick that the Healthy Spaces, the change is already made. The way we think about our spaces is never going back to the way it was before. It's a tremendous catalyst for renovation activity, a reason for people to renovate their spaces. You heard from Jill on the digital front. The digital front has got a lot of benefits for us. She talked about productivity. The deficiencies that digital tools bring will allow us to scale the business and grow efficiently, continue to get good operating leverage on our growth. We're excited about that. She talked about how cost-effectively we can reach out to new customers who are underserved today and who are inactive. They're not doing renovation. Now they can, we can stimulate demand by reaching out and touching them in a very cost-effective way. It's an exciting platform for us going forward. Again, we have secular tailwinds like we haven't had in a decade, and that feels really good, and we're innovating into that to make sure that we capture our fair share of that tailwind. Again, the building blocks are in place. We've been investing in these initiatives for the last couple of years. This feels like a really good time to be talking about them because we're getting the traction and the confidence behind what they can deliver for us going forward. They're in place for us to once again accelerate the growth of this company. With that, we're gonna move into a Q&A session, and I'll turn it over to Theresa. Yes. We're gonna pause for a few minutes to prepare for Q&A. We'll let the management team get situated on the stage. Those of you joining virtually, we have a chat box to submit your questions. We will be going intermittently between- Good morning, everyone. This is Philip Ng from Jefferies. I appreciate the presentation, very informative. I guess, Vic, big macro picture, certainly there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, a lot of inflation, and rates going up. I guess what's the biggest risk to your longer-term targets? I mean, you're assuming a pretty sharp acceleration of EBITDA growth from top line. Yeah. That's my first question. My second question is, on the AUV, you're assuming a pretty noticeable step-up. Can you kinda help parse out what's price versus mix? With that acceleration in the AUV, could we see a step-up in that 60% incremental margin target you guys kinda laid out in the past? Thank you. Yeah. Phil, thanks for the question. On the macros, clearly we're watching what's going on, right? The inflationary environment really was strong in 2021 and hyperinflation actually on the steel and the aluminum side of the business, right? Again, as you know, we were very successful in staying ahead of that inflation. We're paying attention to it on the supply chain side as well, making sure there are no disruptions. Our teams are building contingency plans around that. The one thing about the inflationary environment, the macro environment that you're referencing there in terms of inflation, it's likely we could stay at a higher inflationary levels for a while. Again, this company's got a proven track record on being able to price ahead of inflation. It's the value creation that we have with our customers that allow us to earn this price. Again, we're gonna stay ahead of the inflationary curve, whatever that is, to make sure that we're getting enough price over inflation so that we can continue to expand our gross margins. On the AUV side again, longer term, so stretch it out, this balance of 50/50 is about right, I think for you to think about this. Price, about half of the AUV improvement and mix the other half of the improvement. In the short term, in this higher inflationary environment that we're in right now, we can expect a little bit more price than mix because of the inflationary environment. That's very typical of what we see. That's what we saw in 2021 in particular. I think in 2022 and maybe even 2023, you might see a little bit more price in that AUV growth than mix. Over time, it should balance out as it has historically into that 50/50 mix. I'm sorry, about margins? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. As we get on the leverage side of the SG&A investments, we should be continuing to expand our EBITDA margins. Again, if you watch what we've been able to do on the gross margin line, we've been able to stay ahead of inflation to the point we're expanding gross margins, which is really impressive when you think about the amount of inflation the team has faced and the ability to stay ahead of it on price. There hasn't even been a lag on price over inflation. Again, an excellent performance. This team's got a great ability to do that. I think at the gross margin level, it's proven we're gonna continue that. As Brian, I think, spoke to we're gonna invest again in SG&A behind these initiatives you heard about this morning. As in 2023, we start to catch up with our sales growth behind these initiatives, that'll catch up to the SG&A, and we'll start to get good operating leverage. We expect to expand EBITDA margins going forward. Thanks. Thanks. Hi, Rafe Jadrosich from Bank of America. I wanted to first ask on the AS segment. Can you talk about where your market share is today, and then where your assumptions get you to in 2026? In terms of the margins in AS, you have really healthy expansion, I think 600 basis points in the next two years that you're baking in. Can you just give us more color on how you get there? Yeah, I'll let Mark address that second part. The AS segment, we've kinda sized approximately because it's a very fragmented segment. We've sized it about $1 billion in the Americas part of the business. You can see we're in that 20%-30% share range is kinda how we gauge it for now. I say it kinda loosely like that because the more we peel this back, the more opportunities that we see within this Architectural Specialties space. It gets us excited. That TAM could be moving around on us a little bit, but the point of it is, and I think your point of your question is, we're at a relatively low share position in Architectural Specialties, which gives us a long runway still for us to penetrate this market faster and ahead of where the market is growing. Then on the margins, I'll let Mark speak to that. Sure. It's really about doing what we do best inside these new businesses. It could be pricing, it could be operational excellence, but it's bringing that discipline and those practices to these new businesses in our hands for the first time, and also realizing the scale of having multiple locations and a network of operations that haven't felt the power of that operational strength in the past. Next question. Thank you. It's Keith Hughes from Truist. Your five-year guidance is a real step change in terms of the revenue expectations. Yeah. The EBITDA didn't move up as much as I thought it would given that revenue expectation, and there's just not as much margin gain. Given that you talked about margins moving up in AS and then the SG&A leverage you discussed, is there something else cost-wise going on here that would present faster EBITDA than I- Brian, do you wanna take that? Yeah, I'll take it. As you can imagine, we start, and you saw on the chart we had, as we continue to scale that digital investment in Healthy Spaces, we'll continue to put some additional SG&A dollars in there. There's still a nice flow-through to see margin accretion at the EBITDA line. Okay. There's still a little investment in that SG&A continuing. Just to extend the other one in on AS, the getting to $500+ million, this looked like an organic growth rate in the low teens%, kinda what you said, in the slide. Are you making no assumptions, I assume, for acquisitions? Are acquisitions just not gonna be a big priority in this space moving forward? Go ahead. I'll take it. Well, go ahead. Yeah, Brian wants to answer that one. We'll let him. No, we're not taking our foot off the gas. No. We're open for business on the acquisition side. You're right. We've not assumed any acquisitions in that look, and we'll continue to find them. We'll be pretty disappointed if we don't do at least one deal in 2022. Our intent is still the same. 1-3 deals, spend roughly $50 million. They're smaller, privately-owned, mom-and-pop shops, kinda $10 million of sales to $50 million range is the sweet spot. The pipeline's strong, and we've got the team looking at it and building and fostering relationships. That timing of when the deal closes isn't always up to us. It's usually about where they are in their succession planning, when they're looking at retiring and being ready to sell. We don't see a lot of competition for the targets we're talking to. Most of the time the targets know us, and there's a predisposition to wanna talk to us about something and getting something done. Hi. Thank you. Garik Shmois, Loop Capital. Thanks for all the detail today. Two questions. First on Architectural Specialties. If you hit your targets, you'll be at 20% margin by next year. Just curious, in the slide deck, expecting to be over 20%, any way to calibrate the potential upside in Architectural over the 2023 to 2026 time horizon? Secondly, in Mineral Fiber, as you expect to see an acceleration in volume, what does that mean for inventories and working capital, both within your production as well as at distribution? Hey, Brian, why don't you take the second half of this? Yeah. Let me address the Architectural Specialties question because the 20% is kind of a minimum threshold for us that we think and we understand from what we bring to this platform that we should be at 20%. There's lots of points of leverage with our Mineral Fiber business that gives us a unique capability to make money in this segment versus a lot of other smaller players who just don't have the scale to make money in this business. 20% is kind of a minimum threshold that we've put out there for ourselves. By the way, which, when you benchmark with other building products companies, would put this in kind of the top ranks of building products companies. That would make us feel really good about the, again, leveraging those points of leverage on our Mineral Fiber business. With that said, we're not looking to maximize margins here in the short term. We wanna get to 20, but we think that's a healthy place for us to be. We expect to get better at this business so that we can have incremental improvement in margins, but this is our growth engine. We think there's a long runway ahead of us here, and we wanna. We don't wanna sacrifice top-line growth to try to maximize margins too early in our growth phase. That's how we think about it. Let's get to the 20%, and then incrementally through productivity and getting better at this, we'll march it higher. That's not our intent to drive it up into the 30% range or something like that. That's not our objective in the next five years. Brian, on the working capital. Yeah. First, let me get some stats out there. Our net working capital is roughly 24 days. I mean, it's pretty darn good to begin with. We run at just under 10% of sales for total working capital. As we see Mineral Fiber volume growing and AS growing, we are gonna see working capital naturally move up, so it becomes a little bit of a headwind on free cash flow, but at the same rate we've experienced in the past. We'll keep that working capital somewhere between 9%-10% of sales as those sales grow. Thank you. We now have a question from the online audience. Yeah, this question is from Catherine Thompson. What end markets is Healthy Spaces currently focused on? And are there any end markets that would fit well but currently are not being heavily targeted? Nick, wanna take this? Yeah. I think like I said, all spaces should be Healthy Spaces. Where we're focused today, given the government stimulus money, $190 billion, we're focusing first on education, healthcare, and office as our main focus areas. Um. We have another online question related to Healthy Spaces. I'll feed through here from John Lovallo. Has penetration of your Healthy Spaces offerings been as rapid as initially expected? If not, what has held it back, and what do you foresee as the catalyst, aside from the approximately $190 billion in federal education stimulus? Let me take that. I think the answer to that, and it's a good question from John. The answer to that is that it's not been the snapback in pull-through demand as we would have initially expected. Sitting in 2020 in the height of the pandemic and the emotion of the pandemic, I think the back-to-office has taken a lot longer than we all expected. I think the complexity of government spending in education, we're also finding, is a much longer decision cycle than we anticipated. We're no less excited about it, but I think it's a fair question that it's not happened as fast as I think any of us would have expected, given the conditions and the complexity in the marketplace. Thank you. Next question. Hi. Thank you. Susan Maklari from Goldman Sachs. Okay. The first question the digital initiatives sound like they're very focused on smaller businesses out there, the ability to sort of tap into that market that you haven't been as deep in. Is there any risk of cannibalization as you think about some of your bigger customers perhaps taking advantage of some of those opportunities that are out there, and what could that mean for the business? Second question is, the 20% margin in Architectural Specialties, does that incorporate the impact of any incremental M&A that happens in there? What could be the sort of path if you do ramp up those deals? Yeah. Why don't you hold the AS question first, and then Jill, do you wanna answer the size of customers and maybe the potential conflicts of that? Yeah. Susan, you're right. We're very focused on that underserved market with Kanopi. It's a convenience buy, right? We've set it up so that it's a convenience buy. If we do get big opportunities, we're passing those right through our distributors and letting them service it. We're hopeful that we're driving demand with our social media campaigns and some of the advertising we're doing. Regardless of where it goes for those underserved markets, it's growth and that's a great thing. On the AS side, that excludes any acquisitions, any future acquisitions. We'll get back to 20%+ EBITDA margins, but the assumption is no acquisitions in that number. 2 acquisitions this year or next, could that slow the timeline of getting back to 20%? It is possible, but as you look back at 2020 acquisitions, their margin is actually higher than the AS segment margin. We'll see which deals come forward. Yeah, it's possible. It's possible. Next question. Hey, thanks everyone. Adam Baumgarten, Zelman. Just on those potential partnerships in AS, would that include additional applications outside of ceilings and walls, potentially? Talk about the partnerships just for a second, but we are really focused on ceilings and specialty walls right now. I think we laid out we have a tremendous opportunity to grow our business staying focused on that. From a business standpoint, that's where our focus is. The partners in which we partner with to help us with Healthy Spaces in particular is really where our big focus on partnerships is. Although we partner all the time with third-party suppliers, for example, in AS, that we don't wanna own or acquire, we wanna partner with them. The partnerships in the Healthy Spaces are certainly outside of our business, if you will, ceilings and walls. They're in HVAC, they're in diffusers, they're in other areas that by partnering, we can have a stronger product offering to the spec. Does that clarify what you were asking there? Yeah. Again, I think we don't need to go outside of ceilings and specialty walls for us to find growth as we presented today. Hi, this is Miles Petrie from BBH. We didn't get a chance to talk too much about WAVE within that new value creation model guidance. You mentioned a guide to double-digit equity earnings growth from the JV. Can you talk a little bit about the volume drivers of that business over the next five years, how that compares to Mineral Fiber and what the drivers are for growth if the bottom line being faster than the top line? Brian, you and Jill wanna take that? Yeah. Okay. No, I'll take it. Jill mentioned some of this in her digital side, but the digital initiative is also helping WAVE on the grid side, and she can go deeper into that with you a little bit. If I break down WAVE for a second, some volume growth, right? Clearly as it's sold as a complete unit when you look at ceiling tiles and grid. We see that economic stimulus helping pick that up. Then they continue. They always have to get price over inflation and grow margins through that. On the digital side, how does that help WAVE? Yes. We're including WAVE in all of our digital initiatives. They're part of what we do. Very specifically, ProjectWorks focuses on the specialty grid side and really again, takes those complex solutions and make them easy. We're driving that service as well. One thing I'll add there is those products. Those are all WAVE products, but some of their specialties are at higher margins, and so they help mix up WAVE also. Next question in the room? Any questions online? Okay. Okay, great. They're trying to help you finish on time, aren't they? That's right. That's right. We are on time. Okay. Okay. Well, this concludes the formal part of the day. Those of you who are joining virtually will be able to see a sample of the demonstrations we are about to do on campus with a video, and we appreciate you joining our event today. At Armstrong, we have been working on what a healthy space of today and tomorrow will look like. Today, we will be showing you our recently opened Living Lab, where we have brought in multiple leading partners in the design and construction industry to create one of the healthiest spaces. We know ceilings can do more, and we know that with where the world is today, people crave and demand and expect a high level of information about the quality of the environment that they're in. The Living Lab here at Armstrong World Industries campus delivers just that. From the moment that you walk in, you notice the natural light, and the first thing that you see front and center is an air quality dashboard telling you exactly what the level of quality is of the air that you're breathing in the space. I think the experience that employees and customers have as they walk into the space. It's just a really good feeling, whether it comes from the design of the space for being able to have different types of furniture and different types of spaces to interact with each other throughout the day, whether it's the access to natural lighting, the ability to work indoors or outdoors, depending on what they're working on, and even the season or time of day, and also just the overall design. You know, feeling where we're bringing more natural elements. We have traditional plantings, but we also have a beautiful green ceiling above our work cafe. We have a product called TECTUM installed that's made from aspen trees, which is also providing excellent acoustical performance in the space, and we really have kind of a really dynamic graphics as you go throughout the space, which are incorporating some of the flora and fauna that we have here on our own campus. In multiple ways, we're really kind of bringing the outdoors in in the Living Lab. 24/7 Defend portfolio solutions focuses on containing, cleaning, and protecting the air, and now the ceiling can be seen as a total indoor environmental quality solution. Hello, everyone. My name is Gabriel Farias, Senior Director of Technology at Armstrong World Industries, and I'm pleased to introduce this video presentation that represents a small sample of the innovation process at Armstrong. Our innovation ambition is to build purposeful and market-driven innovation into all that we do. That ambition becomes live when it comes to solving customer problems, utilizing the creativity of our teams. Today, we would like to highlight just a few product solutions in Mineral Fiber, grid, metal ceilings, and our TECTUM product line. These applications not only offer superior product attributes in areas such as acoustics, design, and fire performance, but they also add value to our customers due to the ease-of-installation features for maximum productivity of contractors. With that, I'll leave you with Andy Lake, our Director of New Product Development, and Abby Martin, our Architectural Specialties Product Manager, for further details. Our ACOUSTIBuilt platform stemmed from customer VOC and trend data detailing a need for a hard-lid visual with acoustic performance. In so many instances across our market segments, whether it's office, healthcare, education, or mixed use, there was a real need for controlling noise, yet delivering a monolithic visual. Our ACOUSTIBuilt ceiling system introduced a seamless acoustical ceilings and wall system that looks just like drywall but offers the performance of Total Acoustics. Let me introduce Julian Treasure, a five-time TED Talk speaker. As he walks our avenue space here on our corporate campus in Lancaster, listen to the difference as Julian demonstrates standard drywall versus the Armstrong ACOUSTIBuilt seamless acoustical ceiling system. I'm standing in the lobby of a typical commercial space, and I've chased away all the employees to talk with you for a few minutes about my favorite topic, sound. I'm standing under a typical drywall treatment. Drywall is a hard surface and absorbs virtually no sound at all. The sound travels back into the space, resulting in long reverberation times and noise. You can actually hear this as I talk. Here, this may demonstrate the effect a bit better in video. As I walk toward the ceiling cloud on the other side of the lobby, I'm continuing to speak at the same level. Now, instead of being under drywall, I'm standing under an ACOUSTIBuilt seamless acoustic ceiling system, and the sound is much improved. Way lower reverberation time. Quiet. Because this cloud absorbs sound hitting the underside and blocks sound from above, like HVAC, it actually has a ceiling attenuation class of 48. It absorbs up to 80% of the sound in the space. You can really hear the difference. That's the improvement in reverberation time. ACOUSTIBuilt ceilings are part of the Total Acoustics ceiling system family, offering the ideal combination of sound absorption and sound blocking, the look of drywall in a seamless acoustic ceiling from the people you trust for acoustics. Bring down the noise with ACOUSTIBuilt seamless ceiling systems. We strive to create solutions that save our customers time and money. The team at WAVE, our joint venture with Worthington, introduced a prefabricated soffit framing system that is engineered to the dimensions needed for each specific project. Now, soffit framing requires a significant use of labor and materials on the commercial construction job sites with a variety of complexities based on design and accommodations of HVAC and lighting. We realized creating savings in this area could be a valuable game changer. Our prefabricated soffit framing system quickly clicks into shape and installs three times faster than traditional methods. That saves time, material, and labor on the job site. It also ships completely flat in standard cartons, which makes loading of the project a breeze. Let me turn it over to Cliff Snedeker, our Senior Technical Sales Manager, who took a walk during the Florida Wall and Ceiling Show to get contractor feedback on our new SIMPLESOFFIT system. Hey, this is Cliff Snedeker. It's July 2021, and I'm at the Florida Wall and Ceiling Show. It's gonna start here in about 20 minutes, and I'm gonna be at our booth with a bunch of samples of SIMPLESOFFIT. They're gonna be flat. We're gonna hand them to contractors, let them fold it together, and get their thoughts on this exciting new product from Armstrong. Hey, I got Frankie with Precision here. How you doing? He's out of Tampa, Florida. Give that a fold there, Frankie. It's that easy. It's that easy. That's beautiful. Now you've done soffits out of drywall grid before? Yes, regular grid. This beats it all. That beats it all. That is simple. That's it. Okay. That's it. That should be the slogan. That's it. Well, let's try it out. Okay, snap it right. Oh, there we go. This is how fast you could do a soffit. You could frame it basically in minutes. Yeah. I'm sold. It looks really simple, I'll tell you that. We're gonna give this a try real quick. Come on, let's see how it is. Okay. What was that? 5 seconds? Speed up time, reduce cost and labor. I like it. I like it a lot. Thanks, Andy and Cliff. That was a great example of how innovation can lead to truly simple solutions. I'm Abby Martin, Product Manager for the Architectural Specialties business. As the Architectural Specialties business continues to grow, we have put business teams in place to help us accelerate market-focused solutions and, at the same time, address capacity issues before they happen. This approach has reaped benefits, especially in challenging market conditions such as labor shortages and supply shortages. Our business has been able to rapidly expand our offering through innovation. Our teams lovingly refer to this as the metal explosion. In the past five years, we have acquired multiple businesses. With these new teams and capabilities, we've been able to expand our standard offering, which means we have simplified specification, simplified quoting, and simplified ordering. We've also increased our wood looks on metal from 6 standard finishes to 28, including our new SEQUELS finish. In a time when long lead times are plaguing the commercial construction industry, our innovation teams have come up with a new way for this finish on metal, and we've been able to reduce it to a remarkable 4 weeks lead time, which is the fastest in the industry. Perhaps most importantly, innovation in our metal category pushes us to find that sweet spot where we can marry together the architect's vision, the aesthetics, and the performance while reducing complexity for our installer. Some of the examples of this engineered solution is our trimless downlight solution. This is a factory-cut metal panel. I don't know if you've ever tried to cut a panel out in the field. It is never as clean as this one will be. We've integrated it beautifully with this trimless downlight to simplify the contractor's job. Beyond this, another example is taking the ever-popular linear look. You've seen panels like this probably everywhere that you go, especially in transportation jobs. Historically, one panel gets installed, then the next panel gets installed. We've taken that step to make the contractor's job more easy while achieving the aesthetic by creating first to the market panelized solutions. Here, simple ridges create one unit to get four plank looks installed on our torsion spring system. Basically, we've reduced that contractor's time by half. Now, let's join Jimmy Hammer and Marie DePolo as they share innovation around our TECTUM product family. We've increased quality and added designer value, inspiring architects to use this unique product in even more spaces. TECTUM has been a long-standing product in our line, and it's great because of its rich texture and its durability and its acoustics. With TECTUM DESIGNART, we're adding shapes and new routed visuals and 24 new standard colors to really up the visuals of that product line. TECTUM DESIGNART shapes, it now has 30 standard shapes. We're looking at a small and a large size for shape, but thinking about a variety of spaces that it's well suited for, retail, hospitality, entertainment, high-traffic areas that allow some bangs and bumps, but knowing that it's gonna hold up and it's gonna continuously perform the acoustics over and over again. We have a pattern gallery with over 100 patterns that are going to be standard patterns with bill of materials, drawing packets all set up for those, but that really just feels like it scratches the surface of what this product can do and the different visuals that it can create. We're truly providing a toolbox or building blocks that allow for more creative freedom from architects and designers to bring a variety of different shapes that could complement their brand to different linear patterns that contribute to different design elements within a space. We now have the acoustics and the sustainability and the durability, but in a highly stylized product that allows them to customize and to make their own. I'm Nate Baxter, Director of PROJECTWORKS Design and Pre-Construction Service. PROJECTWORKS streamlines the entire construction process from ceiling design and visualization to takeoffs and quoting through installation. PROJECTWORKS will turn our customers' ceiling design concepts and project RCP into one convenient, efficient work package that includes products and solutions across the entire Armstrong Ceiling portfolio. I'm here with Nick Freese, Senior Designer and Developer as a part of the PROJECTWORKS team. In this video series, Nick's going to go through some in-depth demonstrations to illustrate how we are utilizing digital technology to change the whole dynamic of how we collaborate with our customers and support the projects they are working on. All right, Nick, for this first demo, we're gonna show the DESIGNFlex Shapes ceiling system. We're gonna illustrate here is a complex layout with LYRA Shapes panels, SUPRAFINE suspension systems, and AXIOM perimeter trim. In addition to that, we'll also show how partner light fixtures and diffusers can be integrated. Let's show them what this can do. Sounds great, Nate. Let's get started. What you see here is the RCP supplied to us by the architect or the designer. This RCP contains a whole bunch of different ceilings, spaces, and layouts. What's great is the software that we've built for PROJECTWORKS is based on the industry standard of AutoCAD, so we're able to directly import that AutoCAD file from the customer right into our software. As Nate said, we'll get started with our DESIGNFlex hallway and our two DESIGNFlex clouds on either side of this corridor. First thing we're gonna do is simply trace out the spaces we want to apply a ceiling to. Now, the software uses a bunch of advanced algorithms to be able to identify all the different lines and drawing work that the architect or the designer has supplied for us. It's as simple as just highlighting and hovering over a space, and you can see here when I click, it outlines that as a ceiling space. We'll come in here to our curved corridor and select that space, and then finally the other DESIGNFlex cloud on the right side. Now, with the software, we have a bunch of built-in pre-made patterns and ceiling designs. However, we can always create new designs that the architect might come up with, or we can work with the architect or the designer and collaborate on a new design for a ceiling system. The first thing we're gonna do is take this DESIGNFlex cloud on the left. We have this tool called our Apply Pattern tool, where it's as simple as searching for the pattern we want to apply to the space, and once we click, we can insert it right into the predetermined perimeter that we have selected earlier. Now, you'll see here there are some warnings that have popped up on the screen. What we have done for every single ceiling system within the software is built in a bunch of installation instructions and details and rules so that our CAD team can properly position and rotate the ceiling so it fits in the space properly. This is important because we wanna make sure that there are no clashing of hardware or issues with the installation before we generate that bill of materials and before the customer goes and orders all this material for the job site. With the help of the software, we're going to position and move this ceiling slightly to the center here. You can see it snaps right to the center of the space. Now when I hit Finish, all of those warnings are gone. The software here just helped us move this pattern, and it made sure that none of these cross tees around the perimeter were gonna clash together and create any problems on the job site. This is really important because sometimes we get a design and we'll put that design exactly as the architect has drawn, but if we identify any problems, we're able to go back and have that conversation and fix those problems right away. Next thing we're gonna do is apply that same pattern over here to the right side. Again, this is gonna be pattern 11, which is our LYRA Shapes patterns. You'll see those warnings pop up again, so we're gonna go through, again, position and rotate that ceiling so it snaps to the very center of the space. Now, the next thing we're gonna take a look at is this hallway. In this design, the architect has asked us to actually test a few different patterns out. They aren't quite sure which pattern or which ceiling is gonna look great, so with the help of the software, we can actually very quickly adjust and change the different patterns in the space to get an idea of what each ceiling system looks like and how it's gonna fit. For example, the architect may ask first if they could see a 2-by-2 Calla ceiling system in the space, and you can see how quickly that generates. Maybe they say "Let's take a look at pattern 11, the one that's on the left and right, and see how that looks." We'll move this window out of the way. They can evaluate that, take a look, see what the parts and pieces are. Ultimately, in this case, the architect did ask us for something with a little more contrast. They wanted to make sure that the hallway stood out a little bit more from the left and right side DESIGNFlex ceilings. We're gonna ahead and pick pattern 1. You can see pattern 1 is very unique. It has some slightly smaller LYRA shapes. Again, we're gonna go through and position and move this ceiling so that it's centered perfectly in the middle of the space. We'll hit Finish there. Now, the next thing we're gonna do is regenerate our warning system to make sure that we've alleviated all of the warnings. We'll go through and click that, and there we go. The software has refreshed, and it says we have alleviated all of those possible and potential warnings or clashes with the hardware at the perimeter. Now that we've created a successful system, we're going to input some of our partner light fixtures and diffusers. What's important here is that we do have some really great partners in the lighting and diffuser industry, and a lot of the ceiling systems and designs that come to us from the architects include these fixtures. We figured why not build them into the software? The first thing we're gonna do here is apply some Axis geometric light fixtures. These were made by Axis to work specifically with the DESIGNFlex ceiling system, and that's as easy as me just selecting the panels that I wanna make a light fixture and selecting light here. You can see, just a few clicks, I was able to input 8 geometric light fixtures into the ceiling system by Axis. Now, the architect did ask for a little bit additional lighting for this space, and to be unique and creative with it, we're actually gonna use our JLC-Tech T-bar light fixtures from our partners at JLC. They've created light fixtures that can actually replace the cross tee with a light fixture. You can see here now, just like I did with the panels, I can take this tee and swap it for a light fixture. Now, I'm not gonna lay out the whole space just yet, but this gives you a good example of how we can very quickly and easily integrate not only lighting but different patterns. Oh, and also the diffusers. We also have our great partners at Price Industries who created geometric diffusers that work with this system. You can see here, just as easily as I did the lights, I can also put in some geometric diffusers. Now, what's most important here is the magic that's happening in the background. What you see is just some panels and some light fixtures and some shapes, but actually what I'm about to do is turn on our tag system, and this shows you how the software in the background is constantly updating and regenerating that bill of materials to reflect every part and piece and panel needed to create this system. Let's go ahead and turn those tags on. You can see as I zoom in really close here, every single panel, every single piece of grid, every light fixture, and every location that there's hardware is clearly defined throughout this entire ceiling system. It does not matter how big or how small the ceiling is, the software within seconds will generate this content. Every time I make a change or I move the ceiling or I rotate it, this entire ceiling system is regenerated, and within seconds, all the hardware is recalculated. You can see here in just a few seconds, we've generated a 3D isometric detail for every connection and every piece of hardware throughout this entire DESIGNFlex ceiling system. Not only did we lay out the ceiling, we generated all the parts and pieces, but we now generated 3D details so the contractor knows exactly how to install the system on the job site. From start to finish, we've got the entire ceiling covered. Wow. Nick, that is a comprehensive approach to working through that project, laying out a complex system like DESIGNFlex Shapes, being able to show all the panels, all the suspension, all the hardware, and even the partner light fixtures and diffusers. Very nicely done. On to demo 2. Here we got standard Mineral Fiber tegular 2-by-2 panels, but focusing on our Healthy Spaces portfolio. We have a large layout with CALLA AirAssure panels, generic 2-by-2 light fixtures, and VidaShield units throughout the space. Here we have the office space A in this total RCP plan. Again, we're gonna go through and first highlight the areas that the architect has designated for the ceilings to be applied to. This space in particular has quite a complex layout with a couple different drywall bulkheads and then the CALLA AirAssure panels in between. The first thing we're gonna do is apply a 2-by-2 CALLA AirAssure ceiling to all three of these spaces combined. We'll go into our pattern gallery and select the 2-by-2 pattern. Once this generates, we can then, as before, position and move these ceilings so that they are centered within the space. What's great with this tool is that we have the ability to align the ceilings with exactly where the architect has specified. We can, one, check and make sure that there's no errors at that spot, but two, make sure that the ceiling is aligned with exactly how the architect has designed it. We'll come in here, we'll grab our position snaps. We can preview the RCP behind that was provided by the architect, and then allow the ceiling to snap to that exact location. Again, we'll do that same position move for the top half of the RCP here. We'll preview the specific snap points provided by the architect. What this does is it allows all three ceilings to completely align with each other across these drywall bulkheads. We'll finish with the third ceiling down at the bottom. Position move tool. We will grab our snap point and snap it to the RCP. Now we have all three ceilings completely positioned within this office space. The next task is to apply some of our generic light fixtures. This is important because for very large RCP layouts that have a lot of 2-by-2 or 2-by-4 light fixtures, those lights take up panel spaces. It's important that we put those light fixtures in the RCP layout so that we're not adding in extra material to the bill of materials. In this example, the architect has asked us to put a 2-by-2 light fixture every 6-8 feet throughout the space. As an example, for our CAD team to add light fixtures, it's as easy as clicking every couple panels where the architect has specified that a light fixture should go, and all we have to do is change this panel to a light fixture. This is a reference light fixture, so the architect is able to choose any light fixture that they would like to specify down the road, but it allows us to accurately create a bill of materials up front in the design phase. Now in this layout, we can also put in our VidaShields. We have this awesome tool called the edit ceiling tool. It allows us to take a deeper look and a deeper dive into the actual layout that we have created. In this tool, we have the ability to modify the grid layout and actually change some of our 2-by-2 grid modules to be 2-by-4, which will then allow us to put in a VidaShield unit, which is a 2-by-4 fixture. You can see here, I'm modifying the grid. I'll then go down to our VidaShield unit, and we will insert a 2x4 CALLA VidaShield Health Zone AirAssure unit. We will then finish off the space with two more CALLA AirAssure panels to fill in this open module here. We'll zoom in just so we can see it clearly. Go back to our panel tab, go to our CALLA panels. We'll scroll down to our CALLA square tegular Health Zone AirAssure panels, our 2x2, and you can see this tool allows us to snap it right into place. From here, we can apply our changes, and now once the ceiling generates, you see we now have a VidaShield unit that is inserted into the RCP. From here, we could replicate this on the other side and put additional light fixtures and VidaShields throughout the space. As you look at this space, we also have a lot of perimeter panels that are cut down from their original size. All of these panels started as 2-by-2s, but the RCP is showing that they are actually gonna be cut down to fit around the perimeter. Looking at this, we realized that we could generate a really great tool to optimize a lot of the scrap that is cut away from these panels. If you're cutting away more than half a panel, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to reuse that scrap in another location. To aid in understanding where the scrap is going to be reused, we built a tool that automatically does that for us. The panel optimization tool allows us to pick different levels of scrap rates. In collaborating with the architect, the designer, or the contractor in understanding both the design and also the amount of material that needs to be ordered, we can enter in different scrap values. For example, here we will enter in 2 inches of scrap. This will allow us to force an additional little level of scrap between each panel to make sure that realistically we are reusing the correct amount of material that's left over after each panel is cut away at the perimeter. With just clicking 2 times, once here to the left, once here to the right, the software in just a couple seconds will generate a full panel optimization report. Now if we zoom in, we look at the RCP and we look at the details, you'll see here that the software automatically identifies how you can reuse a single panel in two locations. It also takes it a step further and provides both dimensions for the cut panels, but also provides labels to show you exactly where those cut panels go in the RCP. If we take a look up here, we can see all the different panels that were reused or that have scrap that was reused throughout the ceiling plan in just this space. Nick, that's awesome, what you just showed there within that demonstration. You know, one thing to think about too with this is, this is a collaboration with a contractor, right? We're working with the contractor on this project as our customer and helping them understand how they could approach reusing this material. We're not just specifically saying this is exactly what they need to do. We can provide ranges within a panel optimization report that will allow them to see the difference between no panel optimization or reuse of panels in that border condition essentially a low level and then a high level of reuse. In this demo, we're gonna show a new Architectural Specialties product line with 2D and 3D shape panels, along with detailed suspension layout to achieve that installation. An additional benefit of PROJECTWORKS is how this service can be used to boost early adoption of a new product line. Think about it. Architects are working on projects, and they wanna utilize the new products and solutions that Armstrong comes out with. Why not give them an opportunity and support their project by using PROJECTWORKS to lay it out for them and help them understand where everything goes? In addition to our architectural customers, we have our contractors. The PROJECTWORKS service can also detail out all the parts and pieces within that suspension layout and ceiling panels to ensure they know how to install it properly. Where I'm gonna start here is actually on our website. The architect for this project in particular, actually grabbed some inspiration from our website pattern gallery. On our website, we have a series of renderings that show a bunch of different patterns we have pre-created for architects to use as inspiration while they are laying out their space. In this case, the architect chose pattern MetalWorks Torsion Spring pattern 11. If we click on this pattern here on our website, it actually takes our customers and the architects to a really great preview of a rendering with this pattern in a sample space. It also gives them a layout in 2D, so they have an idea of what this pattern looks like in their RCP. If we go right back to the software here is the RCP that we've been using for the other demos, and this area in particular, office B, is where the architect has asked us to put the METALWORKS Torsion Spring pattern. We will go ahead and outline this ceiling perimeter. From here, we will go to our pattern gallery that we have put into the software, and we're gonna put in that METALWORKS Torsion Spring shapes system. We'll go and grab METALWORKS Torsion Spring shapes. This is a pattern that includes both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shapes. First thing we're gonna do is position and move this ceiling, so it's centered in the space and so that our 3D panels are perfectly symmetrical on both the left and right side of the ceiling system. You can see here the software lets me snap it right to the center of the space, nice and easy. We'll hit finish, and now all the panels, the grid, and the perimeter trim are gonna regenerate with what we call our installation tags. This shows us exactly where every single cross tee, panel, hardware, and perimeter trim goes throughout the layout. We can always filter, so we can get a better view of each of these tags. For example, I can turn my grid tags on and off. I can turn the panel tags on and off. You'll also see that there's arrows here. These arrows indicate the directionality of the panels. Whether we're running panel optimization or just helping the contractor understand how to install the system, the software also has that panel directionality built in. Now, you can see here, we also have a couple different symbols on these panels. This indicates the 3D panels. With the pattern that the architect has chosen, this pattern actually alternates between a 2D shaped geometric ceiling system and a 3D shaped system. Again, if we look at that rendering from our website, you can see how the 3D panels are accentuated in the middle of the 2D geometric panels, and it really makes the space pop. Going back to the RCP here, we can also generate what we have done before, which is our panel and our grid schedule. As Nate said, this allows the contractors to understand exactly where all the parts and pieces go. If we come up here to our reports, and we insert our schedules, we can put in our panel schedule, and this is gonna give us the item number, the description, the color, and the exact amount of quantity you need to install this METALWORKS Torsion Spring shape system. On top of that, we've also got the grid schedule, and this is important because METALWORKS Torsion Spring shapes system has what we call our slotted torsion spring grid. This is a very specific grid system, unlike some of our other product lines, and it has slots where the panels actually lock into them. Now if we zoom in here on the RCP, you can actually see that the software has so much detail included in it. It actually shows where every single slot in the grid is and where every single connection point to the panel is. There's no question when the contractors are out on the job site, and this is getting installed, they can see exactly where every part and piece goes. That was a great demo, Nick. So much detail within the system. Nicely done.