Good afternoon. Welcome to PCI's webinar series. 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 for today, I have a few introductory items to note. The handout for this webinar can be found in the handout section of your webinar pane. 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, please type it into the questions pane, or I'll be keeping track of them to read during the Q&A period. This webinar is non-CEU. Today's presentation will be recorded and uploaded to PCI's member resources at PCI.org. Our presenter for today is Bob Risser, President and CEO of the Precast Pre-Stressed Concrete Institute. I'll now hand the controls over so that we can begin our presentation. Good afternoon, and thank you, Royce, and welcome to this latest edition of our update. As usual, we've got a lot of things going on here at PCI, and we'll try to cover some of the highlights of those here in the next 20 or 30 minutes or so. Let's start off right away with the huge success that was the 2023 PCI Convention in Columbus. We had record attendance, over 1,000 registrants just at the PCI Convention alone. One of the highlights was we had 147 students who joined us at the convention. Most of these students were from the PCI Foundation programs that are sponsored all across the country. We also set a record at the Precast Show. We had over 5,200 in attendance at the Precast Show, also another record. Columbus was a big hit. We got a lot of very positive feedback from the members about the town, the restaurants, and other things that were there, all the hotels that were attached to the convention center. We're looking forward to potentially going back there someday in the future, and hope you were able to join us and had a great time at the convention. Let me take this opportunity to make a plug for the 2024 convention. We'll be convening February 4th to 6th in Denver, Colorado. Looking forward to that. Many, many of you hopefully attended the convention the last time we were in Denver in 2018. It was a great location. The Hyatt Hotel will be our headquarters along with our friends at NPCA, and it's right across the street from the convention center. Looking forward to that venue and hope you can join us next February. Let's quickly review a number of other PCI activities and events that are happening before we ever get to the convention. First we'd like to talk about is the NCBC Bridge Workshop. I've got a slide with that next. We'll talk about that August 2nd to 3rd. That'll be held in Wisconsin right near the Minneapolis area across the border. The Architectural Precast Committee will for the second year in a row sponsor their Architectural Precast Concrete Production Workshop September 6th to 8th. That'll be in Hartford, Connecticut. The 2023 PCI Committee Days is scheduled for October 4th to 7th in Tampa. I hope you can join us. This will be the first time we've had Committee Days outside of the Chicago area. We're really looking forward to it. The JW Marriott is a beautiful hotel brand new and should be a fantastic event. We will be having an event to benefit the foundation. We're also going to be celebrating some retirements from PCI staff. I hope you can join us in Tampa. Lastly, we look forward to you participating in Precast Days October 9th to the 20th. Let's talk a little bit about the Pre-Strat Bridge Seminar. This is sponsored by the National Concrete Bridge Coalition of which PCI is a prominent member. It's in cooperation with Federal Highways and is at the request of two of the prominent members of the AASHTO Committee on Bridges T10, which is the Minnesota DOT and the Wisconsin DOT, which is why it's being held on the border between those two states. We're looking forward to a jam-packed two days. We've got Reid Castredale and David Garber from Florida International University who will be the main speakers. It's co-sponsored by some of our sister organizations, Post-Tensioning Institute and the American Segmental Bridge Institute. If you're in the transportation side of things, I hope you take a look at joining us for that particular event. We mentioned Precast Days. We've talked about this in some previous updates, but it's time to move into full gear on this if you're going to participate. This is an event we're participating in with the Canadian PCI, who's done this for many years, and our friends at NPCA. What we're doing during this time period in October is encouraging all of our Precast producers to schedule an open house during that time. These dates also coincide with Manufacturing Day that's put on by the National Association of Manufacturers. We're encouraging members to open their doors to any constituents. Some open them through local community, to the design community, and also use it as an opportunity to show job opportunities that might be available. We've got more information posted on our website. There's materials here on the Marketing Resources section of the PCI website that will give you an opportunity to schedule an open house to help get you started, answer some questions, and of course the PCI staff is always available to help you. We encourage you to schedule an open house during this time period, and please let us know if you're going to do that so we can keep track of the number of plants who are planning to open their doors to their local communities and the design community. The deadline for certification renewals for plants actually was June 1st, so if you have not finished that, please get those materials into us. Also, remind everyone the producers that might be on the call to complete the market survey. It is required for membership, and we really need every producer to participate. It doesn't need to be as detailed as the sales declarations for certification renewal, but this is really our only access to see where market trends are going across the country is to get this from our producer members. The information is completely confidential through a third-party audit firm, so the material is not shared with anyone. I also would like to take this opportunity to invite members to submit nominations for several of our prominent awards. The Sidney Friedman Craftsmanship Award closed June 1st. We have six nominees, which is a good showing. And remind everyone that the PCI Fellows, the Mario Bertolini Award, the Medal of Honor Award are all due August 18th. The nomination forms and information about these awards is on the PCI website under the awards tab. And then October 9th is the due date for our Distinguished Educator Award and the Educator of the Year Award. All of these awards will be presented, or nominees will be presented to the board at committee days in October and then presented at the convention in Denver in February. Again, all the information on these awards and their nomination forms are available on the PCI website. 2024 is going to be an extra special year for PCI. It is our 70th anniversary, having been formed in 1954. And we celebrate every 10 years by naming a group of PCI Titans. The policy allows up to 10 nominations for people who have made incredible and major contributions to PCI and to the industry. To assemble and look at those nominations, we've assembled this Titans Task Group that's made up of five past Titans who've been named and five members of the Executive Committee who have served on the Executive Committee since 2014, and then myself as PCI President. We'll actually be meeting tomorrow. We had 20 nominations for 10 spots. I can tell you it's going to be very, very difficult. For those of you who've been around the industry, there are some folks who've just contributed very greatly and it's going to be difficult to pair that down to 10. But we'll be doing that tomorrow. These nominations will be presented to the Board at our summer meeting here at the end of the month and will also be presented at the convention in February in Denver. We are planning a special very special Black Tie Dinner at the convention in Denver in order to celebrate this next group of PCI Titans. So stay tuned for more information on that. You may recall in our last update, workforce development is identified by the Board as one of the top issues for the industry and for PCI members. We formed a committee last year. They had a workshop in December and then met again at the convention. This group made a presentation. Aaron Clark, who's the Chair, made a presentation to the Board of Directors at our meeting in Denver. And I've just got a couple of slides to give you a broad overview. I'd encourage you to consider getting involved with this committee as we try to bring materials and information to PCI members that can help fill the labor gap that we have in the industry. This group has decided to focus on two areas, both recruitment, getting folks in, and then retaining them. And they've divided the committee up into two subgroups to tackle those issues. You can see here some of the information and ways they're planning on going about and focusing on these areas. We do already have some materials available for members to use and several of our chapters also have on their websites really good information and videos. We have a subscription to a service called QCareer. QCareer is in touch with school counselors all over the country and gives us access to students through that product. Our subscription gives us the ability to post video interviews with actual people who work for our producers in various capacities, usually younger people that try to tell the story about how great a career opportunities there are in the precast industry. Remind everybody again also that PCI itself offers a lot of workforce development opportunities, particularly retention. So remind everyone, LPCI, the next round of applications for that is due coming up this summer. LPCI has an incredible track record. More than 90% of the graduates of LPCI are still in the industry. Then we've got other events for different parts of the operation. Productivity tour, successful in Charlotte last month in May. We just had a great marketing and sales school last week here in the Chicago area. We mentioned the production workshops and of course our many, many committees where folks can get involved. And then lastly, given the number of students who are coming to the convention, we hosted a first ever jobs fair for those students where we gave members the opportunity to set up a little tabletop and talk about the opportunities in their company. And we're planning to do that in Denver. We've got a little task group that we've put together under the guidance of Beth Taylor on our staff to see how we might enhance that job fair and make it even more valuable to both the students and our members. Speaking of workforce development, we are really getting heavy into government affairs in this Congress. You may recall that we've partnered with NPCA in hiring a small lobbying firm, Innovative Advocacy in Washington, D.C. And NPCA's president, Fred Grubbe, and I participated in a fly-in May 15th through the 17th in Washington, D.C. Our major issues were of course workforce development, a few things on interstate trucking regulations, and then just introducing these members of Congress to members that we may have in the districts and encouraging our producers to invite members of Congress to come and visit their plant. So we had a very busy few days while we were in Washington. We did focus on the House Education and Workforce Committee because of the importance of workforce issues. You can see here we met with quite a few members of that committee, both Republicans and Democrats, and had a really good group of discussions. The meetings included the chair of this entire committee in the House and told our story about how jobs have been created but we don't have people to fill them. We had some very interesting conversations with each of these offices and got some pretty interesting ideas including some things about perhaps setting up a process for veterans coming out of the service and also had quite a good conversation about thinking about special visas for manufacturers. The agricultural community has had those for decades and given the shortage of workforce in the manufacturing sector this was something that we were talking about as well and we had good conversations. We got some pretty positive feedback on some of the ideas that we brought forward. We also met with the office of Senator Lindsey Graham who is the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. That's the committee that has jurisdiction over immigration so we talked to them about our members' concerns about that and the need to possibly look at that. Every office told us it's a very complicated issue as you probably all know but we want to keep working on that. The next two visits in regard to that idea with veterans was Sherrod Brown of Ohio who's on the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs and the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rick Scott from Florida. We also had a good meeting with the staff of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee. They oversee all of the public works and infrastructure money. We had a really good meeting with the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee Chairman Representative Sam Graves' office to talk about some of the interstate trucking issues that our members have with different rules crossing the state for large loads particularly on our bridge producer side. And then really exciting, probably the best meeting we had was with the Assistant Administrator of FEMA Pamela Willem. She just was very very excited about our Precast Protects Life campaign and we had quite a good discussion about resilience. She has volunteered to participate in future webinars for us, put us in touch with some potential additional funding mechanisms for storm shelter structures that our members might be able to get their customers to take a look at. So stay tuned for some really good information and webinars working directly with FEMA on promoting Precast for building infrastructure that will withstand events and storms. I mentioned the Precast Protects Life. We launched this a couple years ago and this is our talking about the benefits of Precast to again withstand storms and fires and other events. If you have any examples of this please let us know but we got a lot of good feedback from FEMA and we're looking forward to establishing a really good partnership with them in getting this information out to the design community about how they can use Precast in this capacity. There was a lot of discussion at the convention and on our board meeting about environmental product declarations. These have been around for quite a while. PCI has had a industry-wide EPD for a number of years. We're actually in the process of renewing our industry-wide EPD but it seems that between committee days last year and our convention suddenly a lot of our members were being bombarded with requests to produce an EPD or give an EPD for their Precast and PreStress products. So we could use the producers help this year as we collect data for an industry-wide EPD but the general trend seems to be towards asking for an EPD for an individual plant or even individual product types like hollow core or double Ts. So the board spurred us into some action. I do want to let everyone know that we already do have a number of resources available to PCI members on the website. You can see the industry-wide EPDs we have for architectural and structural Precast and we have some several studies and other resources on lifecycle analysis that are also available. Other resources regarding EPDs are some recent articles. We've got the Marketing Council and Tech's designer notebook is working on that and we've had a number of webinars that are available on our eLearning Center including one that was just conducted a couple of weeks ago. So got some information there. What are we working on going forward? Continuing the webinar series. As I mentioned we are updating the industry-wide EPDs for our members. We have also very recently signed a deal with a company to provide a tool for our members to calculate EPDs for their own plants or products. So stay tuned for some information coming out here in the weeks ahead about how members will be able to access that tool. And then finally we will be completing the creation of a GFRC EPD later this summer. One of the focuses this year from our chair Matt Mullane is on the education side and our relationships with students and professors. We co- sponsored along with the Canadian PCI the professor's seminar with the PCI Foundation very successfully a couple weeks ago hosted by Florida International University in Miami. At that meeting, well before I get to that, really great meeting, good attendance and great conversations. A couple years ago last year we started a roundtable activity where we got the professors to give us feedback about what's needed out there and how we can provide materials. And what we can do to help get the message out and get these kids to learn about precast. We have updated the pre-stress in a box teaching materials. Dr. David Garber of FIU was the lead in that project and he presented to the professors his updated pre-stress in a box. They were amazed and blown away by what he did. One of them said he did much more than we asked him to. So there's some tweaking. We got some feedback from the professors on a couple of the materials but those should be available for this fall semester for professors to use in their teaching. We also have a bigger project underway in the Continuing Education Committee or the Student Ed Committee on a complete 13 week semester long set of presentations that have been drafted. They're being reviewed by TAC and our plan is to have those available for use in the first quarter of 2024 after they go through all that process. Also we continue our PCI Online Academy. You can see here the the next advanced pre-stress concrete design course taught by Dr. Vrenia of UMass Amherst will be held at the end of August and into September. So look for information on signing up for that on the PCI website. We're very excited to announce that the first ever student edition of the PCI Design Handbook is now available on the website to students and professors electronically for free. This limited student edition has just a few chapters. It's got 1 through 5, 9, and 15 so it's not the complete handbook but this is a response to requests from professors and from our chapters, local partners, and our members to make something like this available to students. So with the the help of TAC and the committee and the encouragement of the board and our officers we were able to get this done and is now available on the website for students. You have to have a an EDU email address in order to download it for free. So we're very excited about that. Also on the education side is the Big Beam student competition. This is ramping up again. This competition was hit pretty hard by COVID because no one was allowed to go into the lab. So I remind everyone that the entries are due by June 16th and I would encourage especially any producers who are on this update to look into partnering with a local university program in order to partner with the kids. It's a great hands-on activity and really does a lot of good in getting the word out about precast. Another announcement in our education area. We're very happy to have Becky Massagia join the PCI staff as our new education manager. She comes to us with a extensive association background in the education area and she'll be managing all of our QC schools and other education activities. So welcome Becky to the PCI family. Along those lines here are the upcoming webinars that we have scheduled for the rest of the year. I won't read through them all but this is also available on the website. You can see one there's on precast protects life so we're continuing to push that. And then we work with the the technical team on the body of knowledge webinars and we've got two coming up on GFRC and then one just outlining the extensive body of knowledge that PCI has available for the design and construction community. I mentioned quality control schools. We've got some in-person coming up in Pennsylvania next month and in Nashville in October. The rest of them will be online which continues to be very very popular with our members since folks don't need to get on an airplane and be out of the plane. So that's the schedule through the rest of this year. We do have a waiting list for the online schools if they fill up and certainly we will if that list gets long enough we will add another online course. But I would like to remind anyone who's looking to have a their own in-person school either private or at a location we need we need five to six months lead time in order to get all the logistics lined up for for an in-person class these days. So we're doing those only on a request basis and we need we need a good lead time in order to make that happen. We celebrated the 60th anniversary of the PCI design awards at the convention in Columbus and now we're off to the 61st. So I'd remind everyone that the PCI design awards submissions are due by July 26th and we hope you'll participate and we thank our design award sponsor CRISO and GCP Technologies for their support of this wonderful program. The design award winners get all sorts of recognition that's outlined here. We get a lot of earned media attention from putting press releases out about the about the winners. So I encourage members to put together packages and and make those submissions to us. Earned media continues to be one of our focuses. I mentioned this and mostly these updates and encourage you to forward to us any coverage you've gotten in a magazine or a website or even in some cases TV coverage of projects. We continue to get really good coverage with this. You can see just over the last couple of months we've gotten a lot of free publicity by people covering stories about PCI and about our members projects. We're also excited to announce for the second year in a row we've been accepted to present an education session at the National Institute of Building Sciences Building Innovation Conference. This is where our relationship with FEMA sort of started kicking off because FEMA is a big sponsor of this particular event and we're really excited to have Jim Schneider from our Mountain States chapter be the presenter at this year's conference. So we're looking forward to to that being very successful. I mentioned our sales and marketing school. We had 45 attendees last week. It was a it was very well received. We got a lot of positive feedback from the attendees. I want to thank the the presenters and our marketing staff here at PCI who worked so hard to make this a very very successful event. There will be a marketing and sales school 2.0 that's being planned for next summer so stay tuned for that as as the year unfolds. Just wanted to briefly mention the plans we have for Ascent. You can see the spring issue showcase the design awards and then what the themes of the upcoming issues are going to be the rest of this year and into 2024. So just really briefly talk about the body of knowledge and the extensive work that our technical committees and TAC and TRAC are doing in producing the materials of the Institute. We have four standards national ANSI standards that are scheduled to be published here in 2023. Quite a lot of work has gone into a lot of these. There have been actually in some cases many years in the making. Some of these we will be taking them to the to IBC for reference in the International Building Code. So that's what that's the the main thrust of our standards is that by being national standards they can be specifically referenced in the building code going forward. Other major publications that that the committees are working on on UHPC guide spec, recommended practice on spun cast poles, recommended practice on precast insulated wall panels, and standard practice for ACI 318 2019. We're really happy the Transportation Activities Council is just about across the finish line with the next edition of the bridge design manual. We're hoping to have this out by the end of the summer. As you can see we're so far into production that we've already designed the cover and we hope to have this available certainly by committee days if we can. But this is very close. I want to give a lot of credit to the hard work of William Nickus on our staff and all the volunteers that have that have reviewed and updated this important manual. The bridge design manual is I think our number one downloaded product electronically downloaded on our website. It's available for free and I know of at least one major DOT Caltrans that uses large portions of our design manual officially in their training of new bridge engineers that come to work for for Caltrans. So important document and this will be a great milestone here in 2023. Also in development is the design handbook the the flagship of the Institute. Always a major major project. We're targeting the end of 2023 so that's very well on its way. And then you can see some of the other manuals that are in progress right now within the various committees. So a lot of work being done on the on the technical front here at the Institute. I'd just like to close with a couple of comments about an update on the PCI Foundation. We partner with the foundation in in all areas and I serve on the Board of Trustees of the of the foundation in my role as president of PCI. We're really happy to announce two new programs. One at Auburn University and the other at the University of Virginia. So congratulations. The Auburn one is a little bit of a collaboration between the Gulf South chapter and the Georgia Carolinas chapter. And then the Mid-Atlantic chapter is very excited to have their new program at the University of Virginia. I know this might well on the screen is probably fairly easy but I wanted to show you this is the extent of all the programs that we have currently going that are funded by the foundation. And what I really wanted to show here is a lot of folks we find thought that the foundation programs are strictly for architecture. As you can see we've got multiple programs in architecture but also in engineering and construction management. And what's really interesting is some of these combined programs are really opening some eyes in terms of getting engineers work students working with architecture students. And the payoff from that has been incredible. Same thing with construction management and engineering or construction management and engineering and architecture. So getting these kids talking to each other seeing the different ways they approach problems. The feedback we've gotten on that is really quite extraordinary. So I would encourage you to consider donating to the foundation, getting involved with a local studio or helping make one happen at a college or university in your area. I'd like to mention Project Recast. Again very successful program at the convention. I think we had 24 or 25 students instead of 18 this year. Once again very very well received. I want to thank all the sponsors to those to that program and we certainly look forward to continuing that as we as we go forward. So with that I'd be happy to take any questions. We hope to see you in Tampa for PCI committee days. Thank you. Thank you Bob for a great and informative presentation. We don't have any questions as of yet so we'll hold it on for a little bit more and see if we get any questions at all. Well being that we have received none if you have any further questions about today's webinar please email marketing at PCI.org with the subject header President's Update Webinar. Thank you again have a great day and please stay safe.

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