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 the 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, where 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 Pre-CAST Pre-Stress Concrete Institute. I'll now hand the controls over so that we can begin our presentation. Thank you, Royce, and welcome to this quarterly update on things going on at PCI. I hope that you're having a great day and over the course of the next 30 or 40 minutes have a chance to give you an idea of where we are with some key projects and things that are going forward here at PCI. So, the first thing I want to talk about is our highly successful PCI convention and the Pre-CAST show in Kansas City at the beginning of March. It was wonderful to see so many people, a lot of folks very happy to be back together again, but also an outstanding program. As you can see here, we are PCI convention at 777 registrants, which was about 10% more than pre-COVID in Fort Worth. So, that was wonderful. And the Pre-CAST show set a record for attendance with over 4,600 people attending the show and the show is now over 88,000 square feet, up from 68,000 square feet in Fort Worth. So, just a fantastic venue. Kansas City was great and I can't really say enough about what everybody did. Thanks to all the volunteers, all the members who helped make the committees work, and certainly thanks to our PCI staff and for all their hard work to make it such a great event. So as you know, at our convention, we passed the gavel. And so, I wanted to just review who your new executive committee is at PCI. The chair is Matt DeVos with Jackson Pre-CAST in Jackson, Mississippi. The new vice chair is Matt Boleyn with Course Lab Indianapolis. Our new secretary treasurer is Jim Fabinski with ENCON United in Colorado. And of course, our past chair is Dennis Fink with Northeast Pre-Stress. I'd also like to thank and welcome a slate of new board members. We had several folks whose term ended and so we're joined by the following people. Ned Cleland with Blue Ridge Design who's representing our professional members. This is not Ned's first or even second time on the board and we're glad to have him back on the board. Brandon Farley with ENCON United is one of the two representatives of the erectors. Troy Jenkins with Northeast Pre-Stress Products has taken over now as the chair of the Transportation Activities Committee. Cheryl Lang with the Tyndall Corporation is one of two at-large positions that the board created last year. Andy Osborne with Wisjanie Elsner is the new R&D chair. Richard Potts with Standard Concrete is representing Georgia Carolinas. Ben Spruill with Gulf Coast Pre-Stress is representing the Gulf South chapter. Kimberly Wacker with Wells is the other at-large board member. And finally Lee Wegner with Forterra representing the Mountain State chapter. So welcome to all of them and we look forward to your service at PCI. Some other announcements, things that have taken place since last fall. As you may recall the board voted last year to start moving committee days around and having it every other year here in the Chicago area. We had a little trouble with some of the accommodations in the first go-around so you'll see we're going to have it away from Chicago for two years. But the one in September, September 21st to 23rd of 2022 will be here in the Chicago area in the Rosemont at the Lowe's. 2023 will be in Tampa Bay at the JW Marriott. 2024 will be in Nashville at the Renaissance, a wonderful location just a block off of Broadway in downtown Nashville. That should be great. And then we'll get into the rotation there of every other year back here in Rosemont with us still looking to find the 2026 location. So those are some decisions and things that have been made since last fall. I'd also like to take the opportunity to welcome some new faces to the PCI staff family. Lauren Bell, our coordinator for education and publications. Phillip McConnell, our new office assistant who's going to be helping me but also helping membership and certification. Tim Cullen joined the staff earlier this winter as our director for technical activities. And latest new staff member Noel Morales is joining the certification team as a certification coordinator. So welcome to all of them. I know those of you who were in Kansas City got to meet certainly Tim and Lauren and Phillip and we're really glad to have them on on the team. I wanted to remind everyone we're moving into renewals season. And so certification and membership renewals are going to be started opening on Monday, April 4th. All that can be done is completely automated on the PCI website. And the reminder for the producers that the membership renewal also includes the market survey that we need everyone to do to give us an idea of how things are happening out in the marketplace. So if you have any trouble with the online submittals as we go through the spring, feel free to get a hold of Chris Hurst, C-H-U-R-S-T at PCI.org as our member coordinator or any other staff member can guide you to get you to help your need as we move through the renewal season. So now as always, I'm going to just very briefly walk you through the progress on our strategic plan. Remind everyone again that our baseline goals or goal zeros, we have three of them. And the first is to maintain our body of knowledge and a lot of great work in this particular area. So just a snapshot here of some recent publications that have been put out by PCI. These are all available on the website. Some other standards. These standards that PCI has produced are currently referenced in the 2021 IBC building code. And we've got, as you'll see in an upcoming slide, a number of other national standards that are close to or going to be finished, hopefully here in 2022, that will then be referenced. Some of them will be referenced in future building codes. So those standards that are under development, as you can see right here, 142 for concrete piles, 135 for tolerances, and 130, quality control of GFRC. So all those are in later stages, and we hope to have them published after public comment here in 2022. Also, some upcoming publications that are in the works on guide spec for UHPC, recommended practice on spun cast poles, recommended practice for precast insulated wall panels, and a standard design practice for the 318, 319 code. Also in development are a whole list of things, obviously the design handbook, an updated bridge design manual is targeted for hopefully this summer by TRAC. Randy Wilson and the architectural committee are well underway on the update to the architectural precast concrete manual, and you can see some of the other projects that the various committees are working on as well. Just a little bit of an update on all the things that we've been doing with research and development. As you may know, it's actually in PCI's bylaws that we set aside 8% of producer dues and fees, strictly as a segregated fund to fund research and development for the advancement of the industry. So the R&D committee has been hard at work on this, and we've had a lot of work. Here's a listing of this year's Jenny and Mertz fellowships. I won't read them all, but a lot of really great proposals that we were able to fund. These are all available on the website as well. And just to show you a little bit about the fellowship results, here's some recent publication that was based on PCI funded research. So the material does get out into the journal and out into our body of knowledge. R&D is also looking at a number of special projects that you can see listed there that are all underway at various universities. So we're looking forward to the completion of those, and again, getting that information out into our body of knowledge. One of the most important projects R&D has been working on over the last several years, a lot of resources and hard work from our members, is continuing the development of guidelines for UHPC. So a very large project was recently completed, and the report is now up on the member section under member resources, technical resources, and UHPC. So this groundbreaking report is helping to shape the design future of UHPC, and that's available to members on our website. Goal 0.2 is to maintain and advance our certification programs. And boy, Mike Kesselmeier and the QAC Council have been hard at work the last several years. A lot of things have been rolled out here in the last year that you know about. I want to remind everyone that we now have our certification management system. It went live last fall. So all things exams, registering, everything can be done online, no more paper. And we're planning to continue to advance this with industry verification this year, and then to get the CFA and CCA exams online hopefully this summer as well. This is a layout of a certification management system, and there are a series of YouTube videos on our website that will walk you through how to navigate this new system as you're trying to get people registered. We rolled out the new architectural certification program last summer. I just found out last week, the first that I'd heard of, of a producer that had the new program specifically referenced in a specification for a project coming up. So that's great, and remind everyone that there are materials available like this brochure on our website for you to share with architects and customers about the new program and how it works as we work towards getting it cited in all specifications. The committee did a great job, hats off to Randy Wilson, getting the new program in AIA's master spec, and also just having completed new guide specifications for each guide specifications for each of the categories. So these are now available on our website as well that you can download and use as you're working with your architecture customers. The Quality Activities Council also continues to be hard at work at developing plant quality talks. These are one page or one sheet dedicated to a particular topic, and they've also got them available in Spanish. So these are now, I think there's 24 of them, and the committee continues to work on them. These are also available on the website under quality assurance resources. Our goal three is to maintain or develop and maintain our IT platforms, and the staff has done a tremendous job with this. The latest development is our revised master calendar. All the calendars have now been combined, so you've got both PCI events and PCI chapter events, all located on one calendar and color-coded to make it easy for you to see who's putting on what. So all the chapters meetings, all of our QC schools, are all be listed with the national events in blue and the regional events in gold. We also continue to work behind the scenes on data security. We've implemented an off-site system to better protect the data that we have in our system. We're continually upgrading the internal and external security with training and with various software applications. So take this very seriously, not only protect your information as a member, but to protect the Institute. A sister organization in our in our industry got got ransomware a couple years ago so we're very cognizant of that and working to make sure that we keep that cybersecurity up. Our first strategic goal is to develop and implement a PCI precast building code and as you know that has two parts to it. One is the design standard committee that is taking dozens of provisions out of the design handbook and and moving them into translating them from standard practice into mandatory requirements. This is just a partial list and some of the highest priority that we're looking to move these into standards. The standards committee is well underway and has balloted or in the process of balloting a number of these already. And of course the the big historic news was our partnership with ACI to produce ACI PCI 319 which will be a structural peak precast concrete code. Very pleased to report how much progress has been made. The 319 committee just met earlier this week at the ACI convention and the first draft is out to ballot within the committee so that progress is is well underway. We also had a joint meeting of our executive committee with the executive committee of ACI back in February and got an update from the staffs about how each side of this was going and we were very pleased to be able to report to the board at our meeting in Kansas City that this monumental project is is on track and on time and for reaching our goals of getting this joint document referenced in the IBC building code in the 2027 code cycle. We've also are on a very close to completion the last we're waiting for tack comments back from the committee on a new specification for precast insulated wall panels. This is going to be an ANSI national standard. We're going to have to go out because of that for public comment here in 2022 and the intent would be for this specification to be also referenced in IBC in a future code cycle. Our second strategic goal is to increase our relative market share of precast and I just wanted to give you a little bit of a overview of what's projected and what's going on. Obviously we're going to be entering renewals we'll see what the 2021 sales are reported to for our industry but I wanted to point out here if you look at 2020 and 2019 precast continues to outpace general construction. In 2018 and 2019 we were more than twice the growth and in 2020 despite the COVID dip our dip was was less than construction as a whole. So you can see the projections for total construction going forward in 21 and 22 so if if this trend holds I would expect to see possibly even a double-digit increase in in precast reported for 2021. Hopefully that will be that will continue. I want to remind everyone of all of the education resources that are available on our website. Much of it is free to be downloaded but it also includes continuing education units and and other learning modules. We've got on-demand training that people can take at any time. And just a couple of statistics from from this year and last. You can see just in the in the first almost quarter of 2022 we had almost 70,000 page views and if you look down near the bottom we had over almost 12,000 courses completed last year for people getting engineers and architects getting their PDHs using our system and our website. So we're being very successful in driving traffic and interest about precasts to the PCI website. We continue to have our quality control schools. Here are the QC schools that are scheduled through May. We just had a couple of live schools but the so level one and two later in April. CFA in May and CCA in May. So those should be open and you can get online and register for those classes. One comment I might got about the QC schools. We are trying to find the right balance of how many of the QC schools to offer. We're basically trying to have at least one virtual QC school a month and we're trying to find out where that demand level is. So we've had some inquiries from members wanting to make sure. We do need to limit the number of folks who are on them just from a management standpoint with the instructor. But we want to make sure we offer enough of these QC schools to make sure that everyone who wants to get certified is able to. Also continuing with our big beam competition with the students back in school. I encourage schools in your area to submit their applications. The results are due by July 15th. So hopefully members who are working with a university in their area can get those submittals in. We look forward to a robust competition. We've also got tremendous marketing resources on the PCI website. A lot of publications that are available including our periodicals. The PCI journal Aspire and Ascent. There's some information about Ascent. Currently we've got 16,000 print subscriptions but 33,000 digital readerships. And for those of you who looked at it, the digital version allows us to have links and a lot more robust information than we're able to have in the print version. We do plan out the subjects for Ascent well in advance. So you can see all of the issues for 2022 and into winter of 2023. Their focus has been identified. So talk to marketing or to Becky King if you have any questions about that. Along with our marketing is our outward facing how Precast builds microsite. This allows us to sort of separate the member issues of our website and just have a customer facing microsite to provide information to different audiences and market segments about Precast. One of our focuses continues to be on what we call earned media. This is where we get coverage of Precast projects without paying for them. So we continue to have a big effort. This is an example of some recent coverages and some future articles that we know about. We had 74 of these features in 2021 and we're gonna hope to continue that and even get more. This is just a sampling you can just see since the start of February of all the different articles that have been out there about Precast and PCI. If we archive all of these for any member or any project that's out there. So if you happen to get coverage on a project that you're a part of, please forward that information to to our marketing staff and we'll make sure that a link to that article or that if it's a news feed from local news about a you know a school shelter or something along those lines. We'll make sure that we get that into our system and increase the exposure of that. We also are reconvening this year or we did last year but due to a popular demand we're again having a PCI marketing and sales school here in the office complex where our new headquarters office is. It's scheduled for June 29th and 30th here again in right outside of O'Hare but we've capped attendance at 50. So registration for that is open on the website and if you have an interest in being part of the marketing and sales school please please sign up. We look forward to seeing you here this summer. We also plan later this this summer or late fall or spring to launch a new campaign that we call Precast Protects Life. It will be part of the how Precast builds microsite. It's coordinated with the summer issue of Ascent and this entire campaign is designed to talk about the resilience of Precast to natural disasters and other phenomenon with a whole series of articles and videos that talk about how Precast protects life and the environment. So again we're going to be launching this late in the spring and if you have any projects, storm shelters, anything along those lines that you think would help with this we're looking for videos or images for the web pages. So please contact the marketing staff here at PCI if you've got some materials you'd like us to include. We're also excited this spring to be launching a new video software tool that's available to members free of charge. This will allow members to put together their own videos and upload material about their projects. So any any members will have access to this and it will help you build materials for your company and we're hoping it's going to be a real help for the members to get the word out about their successful projects and the benefit of Precast. So please contact Becky King if you have any questions about this. We will be producing a YouTube video to show members how to use the tool when we launch it later this spring. As always we continue to push out materials on PCI social media. We ask you to retweet and forward things that you're getting from us as we go forward. I mentioned earlier the PCI YouTube channel. This is a growing library of short videos that are available to members for you to use across all sorts of different topics. You can see along the side there some of them are about how to apply for personnel certification, how to request a proctored exam, how to access and download PCI ebooks, and etc. So it's a great tool for answering questions and getting information about how to use the materials that are available. So our third strategic goal is to enhance our members businesses. So I want to remind everyone again of our partnership with Optimum Safety Management and all the tools and programs that are available. Hopefully you're getting the monthly safety newsletter. We are continuing to offer the safety helpline and the Optimum staff works on the plant safety and the erectors committees and their toolbox talk portal. Well over 200 safety tool talks that are available in both English and Spanish. So as a member feel free to take advantage of these of these programs and materials that we've made available. We're also excited about the continuing success of our of our workshops on productivity. This grew out of the point that we only have a productivity once tour once a year. Can we do more throughout the year? So right now we're a series of on acceptability of them peer of appearance. The first two took place in February and in March and so the next one on remedial actions methods and costs goes will be held on April 21st and then the internal and external communication on May 19th. So look look forward to that and sign up when you have a chance. And speaking of the tour our half day we're gonna have a half-day quality summit. It's going to be in St. Petersburg Florida May 9th to the 11th. Registration is open on the website PCI website. We do need to limit the number of people to only 200 for logistics and safety purposes. So if you haven't signed up and you'd like to go please take advantage of that. The hotel deadline is April 18th and you can see we're going to be visiting Finfrock and Durostress, Tucker's, Metromont's plant, Standard Concrete and Stable Concrete in the Tampa and Orlando areas. So should be exciting. We're glad to finally be back on track after COVID forced us to cancel the last two years worth of the tour. So Florida this year and then in 2023 we'll be in in the Carolinas centered around Charlotte. So that's a brief update on some of the things that have been going on. I appreciate your attention and we're more than happy to take any questions if if there are any. Thanks Bob for that great presentation. It looks like we don't have any questions. If anyone has any further questions after today's webinar ends you 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.

Bob Risser

Pre-Cast Pre-Stress Concrete Institute

PCI webinar

PCI convention

executive committee

certification programs

market share