Good afternoon, welcome to PCI's webinar series. Today's presentation is the PCI President's Update. My name is Royce Covington, Manager of Member Services at PCI, and I'll be your moderator for this session. Before I turn the controls over to our presenter today, I have a few introductory items to note. Earlier today, we sent an email to all registered attendees with a handout of today's presentation. That handout has been updated and is available now in the Handouts pane located near the bottom of the GoToWebinar Toolbox. If you cannot download the handout, please email PCIMarketing at marketing at pci.org as shown on your screen. Note that all attendee lines are muted. The GoToWebinar Toolbox has an area for you to raise your hand. If you raise your hand, you will receive a private chat message from me. If you have a question, type it into the questions pane where I'll be keeping track of them to read during the Q&A period. There will be a pop-up survey after this program ends. Our presenter for today is PCI President and CEO, Bob Risser. I'll now turn the controls over so that we can begin our presentation. Well, thank you, Royce, and Happy New Year to everyone. I hope everyone had a healthy and safe holiday season. We're able to spend some time with friends and family, and now we're back at full speed heading into 2023. And welcome to our first quarterly update of the year. So let me just jump right in to what we've got going on at PCI, a little bit of a recap. I have to start with the upcoming 2023 PCI Convention in Columbus. We've got a really exciting program. The hotel and convention center are attached, so there will be indoor back and forth like we had in Kansas City. We're really looking forward to it. We've got a number of education sessions, and of course, dozens and dozens of committee meetings, which I hope you can sit in on and maybe consider joining in the work of the Institute. Right now, registration looks really strong for the event. Four weeks out, we're at 648 registrants, which is 35% ahead of last year, 38% ahead of 2021, and even 11% ahead of 2020, which of course was before COVID. So we're really excited, and I'm looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible and joining us in Columbus for the PCI Convention. In addition to the convention, I just wanted to briefly go through sort of the year in terms of major events. In May, the productivity tour resumes again, finally in Charlotte, which we were supposed to be at several years ago, and of course, was canceled due to COVID. So we're looking forward to that, May 1st through the 3rd. The PCI Marketing and Sales School is a little earlier than it has been in the past, it'll be June 1st to 2nd, here in the edge of Chicago near O'Hare, near the PCI offices. Committee days, moving out of Chicago for the first time ever, and a little bit later, the last first week of October, and it'll be in Tampa at a beautiful new JW Marriott that's right downtown near the waterways. So really looking forward to that, hope you can join us there. The production workshop, which came back into existence this year, will again be held next October, and we're looking to go full tilt into precast days. I got a slide talking about that in a lot more detail, and we'll also be doing that in October as well. A reminder that we are going to be moving committee days around. As we said, it's going to be in Tampa this coming October. In 2024, we're going to be in Nashville, right downtown, just a block off of Broadway, that should be a great location. And then we get into a rotation of every other year being back here in Rosemont, outside of O'Hare, in the Chicago area. Right now, we're still looking for a 2026 site. I mentioned the production workshop, this is not the productivity tour. It's a workshop held in October, it was in Milwaukee, and it's sponsored by the Architectural Precast Committee. And it's a revision of a program that was done a while ago and restarted by the Architectural Precast Committee. The subject this year, or last year, was forming. This upcoming fall, we'll be focusing on production. The site for that is in its final stages. So we're not exactly, we haven't targeted. The committee is still working on the final details, and of course, we'll be sending information out about that. And we're looking forward to moving that around to different parts of the country as well. As you can see, it's aimed at production level people. One day in the classroom and one day visiting plants and getting demonstrations. So looking forward to that continuing here in 2023. I mentioned precast days. We did a soft launch of this last fall, and we intend to go with a full launch this year in 2023. We're coordinating it with the Canadian PCI and NPCA. CPCI has been doing precast days for a number of years, NPCA for the past few years. And we're hoping that PCI members will consider participating as well. We're targeting about a two-week period in October. It's also in conjunction with Manufacturing Day, which the National Association of Manufacturers also has in about that timeframe in October. And what we're doing is encouraging producers to have an open house, open your doors to the local community, and use it to grow awareness of precast concrete. Some folks do it with designers to promote the use of precast, some of it to the towns where the plants are, showing the local neighbors what we do in our plants. Others bring in high school kids and college kids and trying to show them what we do as an industry so that they'll consider coming to work in the precast industry. I would also add, future slide I have here on government affairs, that you consider inviting your member of Congress and other local officials to see your plant. Our producer members have a large footprint. And as we establish our name on Capitol Hill, it would be great for us to start establishing our relationships with our members of Congress. More information will be coming out this spring. We'll have templates for banners and all sorts of checklists and things that'll help people get organized and hopefully have that open house next October. At our last update, I wanted to mention, again, the creation of our Workforce Development Committee. As we reported, the strategic plan was updated by the board last summer. And it was mostly intact from the previous plan with one major addition, and that was goals on workforce development. So this committee was formed, it's under the Business Performance Council, chaired by Aaron Clark from Standard Concrete in Georgia, and Vice Chair is Ben Grimsley from CarbonCure. Members, there are still voting seats available. This is an important issue to basically all PCI members. And we're looking at how we can put together programs at the national level that members can use to attract and retain talent in our industry. The committee held a workshop in mid-December here near the PCI offices in Chicago, a one and a half day workshop, where we divided the folks into some breakout sessions and determined what some of the needs are, the areas of focus, so that the committee who will be meeting at the convention can start putting some timelines and some, if necessary, budget numbers for what we want to do at the national level to help us bring in people. As you can see from this slide, a lot of different areas, but the main takeaway was that the committee needs to focus on both recruitment, getting people in, and also retention. And that's keeping them for the day, for the week, for the month, and hopefully for years. So if you're planning on attending the convention and you're interested in this topic, I highly recommend that you consider attending the committee and then maybe even signing on to be part of it. I'd also remind everyone that involvement in PCI can be, in itself, a workforce development opportunity, particularly in regard to retention. We mentioned many of these programs already. The workshops, the tour for your production workshops and tour for operations folks, pleased to report the last two years, restarting the marketing and sales school, a lot of new faces, folks sending people new to the industry to learn it through the marketing and sales school. Although it's not on this slide, I would also mention the leadership PCI program for up and coming talent within your companies. The LPCI committee recently opened up to a larger number of students. The goal is to try, not students, candidates. The goal is to have as many people who apply and are qualified to participate in that very valuable program. Would remind everyone that the retention rate in the industry for LPCI graduates is well over 90%. It's a great way to help retain the next generation of leaders here at PCI and at your company. Then lastly, we are going to be hosting a job fair for students who are attending the convention in Columbus. Last year in Kansas City, we had 100 students, almost all from various PCI foundation programs. The project precast exercise that they go through has 18 of those students. The 18 students who participated in Kansas City all walked away with either an actual job offer from a member or scheduled interviews. What we wanted to do was create an opportunity for the other 82 students, and we're hoping we'll have even more students in Columbus, to have an opportunity to meet some of our members and see what kind of job opportunities would be out there. We've got a job fair Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning at the convention. There are still two or three tables available for PCI members who are interested. Please let us know, contact Beth Taylor or Cindy Ward on our staff, and we can get those last few tables filled if you're interested. We're planning on having food to attract the students, and hopefully it'll be valuable for our members to get access to those students. So in 2024, PCI will turn 70. Those who've been around for a while know that starting with the 50th anniversary back in 2004, and then repeated again on our 60th in 2014, the Institute recognizes the next round of Titans of the Precast Pre-Stressed Concrete Institute. So this is a very special award that only gets given out on our aught birthdays. So next year at the 2024 convention, we'll be honoring the next group of Titans. Reading from the policy, which is on the website, this recognizes individuals with exceptional contributions to the industry, dramatic impacts on our innovation, and unique leadership in advancing and accelerating precast concrete. So here in 2023, we will be taking nominations for the next round of Titans. The policy allows only up to 10, and we hope that you'll consider nominating someone who's really contributed a lot to PCI and to the precast industry. The criteria is relatively simple. It's across any functional area, as you can see, outstanding service and education, research, design, production, quality, erection, marketing, or management. Any functional area, and it also can be given to contributions related to society in general, such as public service that brings positive attention to the industry. So some of our DOT friends, for instance, who've been very active in promoting and helping establish our body of knowledge in the precast industry. So the nominations are approved by a Titan task group that will be recommended to the Board of Directors. Because of the condensed schedule, our intention is to have that group of Titans recommended to the Board of Directors for their meeting in June, so that we've got extra time to get the videos and such together. Submissions are going to be opened on February 14th and open for two months until April 14th. And the policy requires that in addition to a nomination letter, there has to be at least five letters of support from previous Titans, PCI Medal of Honor winners, or PCI Fellows. A list of who all those folks are is on the awards section of our website, as well as a description of the Titans award. And if you're asking who's on the Titans task group, the Titans task group is made up of up to five past Titans, and up to five members of the Executive Committee in the previous 10 years. So I'm very pleased to announce that the following folks have agreed to participate in the Titans task group. Ned Cleland, Bob Vinfrock, Greg Force with Tyndall, Harry Gleisch with Metromont, Jim Voss, JVI, Jim Fabinsky with ENCON, Dennis Fink, Dean Gwynn with GATE, Chris Chuck-Prosak, and Keith Wallace, and then myself make up the Titans task group. So really, really excited about being able to name this next group of Titans, and I certainly encourage everyone to consider nominating some very worthy people who've given so much to the industry. So I mentioned a little bit about government affairs. We are really excited about getting to work, and together in partnership with our new firm in Washington, Innovative Advocacy, and in partnership with our friends at the NPCA. We are sharing the expense of Innovative Advocacy together with NPCA. We participated last year in the Transportation Construction Coalition fly-in, and we intend to do that again this year. It will be in May. You can see some of the issues, but the top issue for both us and NPCA is workforce development, and in terms of Congress, we're mostly talking about working on immigration reform. That's not going to answer the entire piece, but the PCI board believes very much that it was a piece of the puzzle of trying to get the workforce we need to meet the demand. Here's some other issues that we were working on last year, but I want to specifically talk for a second about the mass timber pilot. Last summer in the House Armed Services Committee, there was a proposal, and language was included, to start a mass timber pilot in Department of Defense buildings. We, along with many other groups in the concrete industry, were obviously lobbying against that. But this is an example of why we're talking about trying to get to know your members of Congress from wherever your business is located, if you don't already. It turns out that at the time, the chair of the House Armed Services Committee was in the Tacoma area of Washington. So one of PCI's members, Concrete Tech Technologies, wrote a very, very nice letter to the chairman, who was their constituent, objecting to a mass timber pilot. And I'm pleased to report that when the Department of Defense budget went through last fall, in November, the mass timber pilot was not included. And I strongly believe that the letter that was written by a member company in the member of Congress's district had something to do with that program not seeing the light of day. So again, at the bottom here, I mentioned producer open houses. If you need any help contacting your member of Congress for an invitation to open house, please let me know, and we can use our friends at Innovative Advocacy to make that connection and see if we can make that happen. Moving on, 2022 and 23 were very busy years in terms of our body of knowledge and work on our body of knowledge. A lot of last year was spent getting most of these standards that are scheduled to be published in 2023 near the finish line. So this year we expect to publish our first standard on concrete piles, our first standard on tolerances, standard on quality control for GFRC, and a standard for insulated wall panels that just cleared out of the tack process at their meeting a couple of weeks ago. So going to be a very busy year in that part of production for us. Other upcoming publications we plan to complete and will continue work on this year is a guide specification on UHPC, recommended practice for spun cast poles, a recommended practice for precast insulated wall panels, and of course the Standards Committee continues its tremendous work on sending over PCI provisions for inclusion in ACI PCI, no no ACI 318 standard design practice as a companion for ACI 318. Sorry, I misspoke. Also a very big year for some of our largest publications. The ninth edition of the design handbook is due to be completed at the end of this year. The bridge design manual will be sometime around the middle of this year and work continues on the architectural precast manual and several of the other manuals listed here. All of these things will be worked on with the committees at the convention so I encourage you to take a look at that. So another very busy year. I know in 2022 TAC had almost 50 different items that they had to ballot and review last year so a lot of thanks to those members and all the hard work they did to keep our body of knowledge expanding and moving forward. Another big project this year is we are up for renewal of our environmental product declarations. So there is a environmental product declaration that PCI established along with CPCI for structural precast and it needs to be updated in 2024 or 2025. So this year is the year that we collect the data. So we are we're looking for PCI producer members to start looking at collecting this data and beginning January 1st and we need your help to do that so that we've got enough to do the renewals. We're hearing a lot from the chapters and individual members that specifiers are starting to ask for EPDs on on precast elements so this is going to continue to be a something that's necessary in the marketplace. And along those lines if you're attending the convention we have an education session on materials for sustainable precast and prestress on EPDs. The speakers are listed there and it'll be on Thursday afternoon from 2 to 3 30. So they please plan to attend this if this is an area that you need to get familiar with. And we also plan on having a webinar for all members on EPDs sometime in the spring. We will also be having a EPD article in a sense in the winter issue. Another milestone here in 2023 is the 60th anniversary of PCI's design awards. A real milestone. So I encourage everyone to if you're going to be in Columbus to join us on Friday evening for the design awards cocktail reception where we will honor the 2023 design awards winners. And there's likely to be something a little special celebrating that milestone of 60 years including we think a collage of past award winners going back 60 years. So that should be that should be a lot of fun. And just as the 23 design awards are celebrated we announced the opening of the PCI design awards for 2024. I do want to call your attention that the window for site submission is a little bit sooner in the year. Next year 2024 the convention will be the first week of February so it's moved up considerably earlier. So we've got a little less time to get all the materials together. So the awards site will open on April 17th and it closes July 26th. So and thanks to all of the judges all the submissions the judges and and our staff for making the program so successful. Okay I mentioned precast days already. Just want to spend a little bit of time talking about the tremendous success that our learning management center has been learning management system and our e-learning center has been. I want to call your attention to some of these statistics. In particular so you can see the tremendous number of increase of page views. But what I really want to call your attention to is that as you can see courses started just under 22,000 and courses completed over 17,000. And that 17,000 is a 60% increase in the number of courses completed from 2021. So what that's showing is that we're really being successful in driving architects and engineers in particular because these courses many of them have PDH's for their licenses. So the design community is really starting to look to PCI's website and our learning management system as a resource. And then learning about different aspects of precast. So we're really excited about the success of that going forward and a lot of compliments to the staff and the members who've put these courses together. We also want to remind everyone that last year we launched this video software that's available free of charge for members. It makes it very very easy for you to upload materials and use the tool to make your own videos. YouTube is I think after Google the number one search tool. So short videos about projects and about your products and your company and are extremely valuable to be on your YouTube site. And this tool will help you do that. Moving on to Ascent. Just quickly wanted to review. We have the subject, prime subject of each Ascent established more than a year in advance. So we've got the winter is about a flexibility and adaptability. A key attribute that was identified in the FMI market study that was done. The spring issue as always will be showcasing the design award winners. Precast then and now in the summer and then innovations in the fall and Mythbusters next winter. So if you're interested in any of those please contact Becky King and the marketing staff and the Ascent committee about that. One of the other things that we continue to do on the marketing and education side is our efforts in what we refer to as earned media. That's where we get articles in publications both digital and in print that are talking about PCI or our projects our members projects or different programs. And of course there's no charge because they're actual stories. So as you can see in we continued to have a number of those earned media opportunities in 2022. And just as an example we sent out a press release on the 2023 PCI design awards just back on January 10th. And then earlier this week you can see an example here specifier construction specifier has an entire stream on on our award winners on their on their site. So that's an example of what we're trying to do in terms of earned media. As I say on every one of these if you have information on your project or if there's been any coverage of any of your projects or efforts please forward them to us. We'll put them in the library of coverage that we've had that's on our website. So let us know and we'll include that on the website. Just want to remind everyone again last year we launched this Precast Protects Life campaign. It's a cross all sorts of different media and it's there to showcase the resilience of a precast concrete. As always we are looking for examples, projects, videos, images of tornado shelters or precast used to raise things in coastal areas buildings within coastal areas. Any example that will showcase precast resilience would be great. If you could contact the marketing staff we'd love to include that in our future efforts on Precast Protects Life. Okay I also want to remind everyone of the the Big Beam student competition. This year the results of the competition are going to be due by June 12th and once again the winning team will be recognized at the PCI convention in 2024. The rules and details on the Big Beam student competition are on the website and it's always exciting to see what the students come up with including their videos that are really really something. Also wanted to include a schedule of the PCI quality control schools through the the middle part of the year. I won't read them all but we had a successful one last week in Las Vegas at World of Concrete. Except for the ones that are shown with actual locations based on our current demand all the schools will be online. We do have a level three scheduled in Chicago in May but all the rest of them will be online. If an in-person school is desired it's going to be on a specific request basis and we really need a six-month notification on that so that we can schedule it with the instructors and have time to get the various details in place. So we haven't eliminated in-person schools but they're going to be out and on an on-request basis just because we haven't had very good attendance at some of them in person and the online's continue to be very very popular. There is a waiting list function for the online so if we start seeing that filling up we will schedule an additional online course to make sure people who want to get certified are able to do that. Wanted to give you another an update on some very important work that's going on this has been a big interest to our Education Committee and a lot of our members in the chapters. So one of them is our online academy the basic pre-stress concrete design starts here on January 26 so the registration is still open and there are room there spots available. The planned online academy on connections is scheduled to be completed this summer and we are also completing work on a student version student edition of the PCI design handbook that will be available just a little bit after convention. We're just trying to work out some of the delivery details. Also of interest on the education side PCI is going to be co-sponsoring the professor seminar which the PCI Foundation has been has been hosting for a number of years and we're doing it in conjunction with the Canadian PCI. So that will be in May in in Miami hosted by the by Florida International University. Also coming this spring the work has been completed we just have to finish the formatting and such is an update to pre-stressed in a box. Pre-stressed in a box is a series of teaching materials for professors and been updated in a while and that will be completed here this spring. And then another major effort underway under the Education Council is a much enhanced set of teaching materials. Several professors are working on this and the goal is to produce a complete semester 13 weeks of materials on precast and pre-stressed and that is on track to be completed in early in 2024 and then those will be available for university professors around the country. Lastly I just want to call your attention and don't have the cover here yet to the PCI annual report. So a whole lot more than I've gone over will be included it shows you just how busy a year 2022 was. I want to thank Matt DeVos for his service as chair. I'm looking forward to working with Matt Mullane as our chair starting after the convention. The annual report will be due or not due will be available right before the convention. There'll also be a QR code at the membership luncheon where you can get access to downloading that. I hope you can take a look at it. It does a lot of service to what PCI is doing for you and the value that we're delivering to PCI members. So that's just a brief recap of what's what's going on since the last time we got together. With that I'd be happy to take any questions and as I said I hope to see as many of you as possible at the convention in Columbus next month. Thanks.

PCI President and CEO

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2023 PCI Convention

Workforce Development Committee

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Precast Protects Life campaign