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 your presenter for today, I have a few introductory items to note. The handout for this webinar can be found in the handouts 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 attending 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 page 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 we can begin our presentation. Oops, there we go. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for tuning in to this fourth quarter PCI update as we continue to do this quarterly to keep members up to date on what's going on around PCI. As Royce mentioned already, everyone is muted. If you have questions, there should be time at the end. Please send them in, raise your hand and ask the questions and Royce will read them and I can get you an answer as best as I can. So let's get started. First and most exciting, I want to let everyone know that registration for the 2022 PCI Convention in Kansas City is open. It went live last Wednesday, so I encourage you to sign up. We're looking forward to a terrific event. The Lowe's Hotel, which is the headquarters for the PCI Convention, is a brand new hotel. It's absolutely gorgeous and I'm sure that you're going to really enjoy having the meetings there. We are planning on having all the convention meetings in the hotel, as opposed to the convention center, to make it a little easier for PCI members, especially earlier in the week. And I'm also pleased to let you know that the setup in Kansas City is such that there is a covered walkway between our hotel, the Lowe's, and the Kansas City Convention Center, which is where the 2022 precast show will be held. So there'll be no reason to go outside or to even take buses. So we're really looking forward to this meeting and its location. We also happen to be just a couple of blocks from Kansas City's Power and Light District, which is an area of a lot of restaurants and bars and gathering places. So we're looking forward to a wonderful event and we hope that we'll see everyone there the first week in March in Kansas City. I want to take this opportunity to let you know of a few things that have happened with the Board of Directors at the national level, not only from our meeting at Committee Days in September, but some other activities. Probably the most important or large picture is the Board amended our bylaws to create up to two new at-large producer board seats for the Board of Directors. The thinking behind this was that right now, well not up to this point, every seat on the Board represented a certain constituency and the Board wanted the ability to add up to two additional people who would be a really good addition to the Board without either being a chapter representative or the chair of a council. So we're looking forward to that. The structure for that as approved by the Board is that the Executive Committee will make recommendations and then the Board will approve those seats. I'm also really pleased to announce that the nominating committee, which every year is tasked with determining the nominee for the next Secretary-Treasurer of PCI, that nominee is Jim Fabinski with Encon United. He's currently our TRAC, Transportation Activities Chair, and has been very involved with PCI for many years. So we're looking forward to him coming on the Executive Committee after the meeting in Kansas City. We are also, as you probably remember, the Board earlier this year voted to begin moving the site of committee days around the country every other year. So in 2022, we will be back at the Lowe's and Rosemont outside of Chicago near O'Hare. But in 2023, we'll be moving to a different site. And we put together a board task group of Board members from all around the country. We'll be meeting later this week and making a recommendation to the Board as to the location of 2023 committee days. So stay tuned for that. We'll also be working to update our strategic plan. A number of these issues were identified at a workshop that we conducted in New Orleans during the convention last May. Probably the issue that has come most to the forefront, and we've already started working on some programs, is in workforce development and attracting folks to the industry. So our plan is to draft a strategic plan update and to present that to the Board of Directors for discussion and deliberation at our meeting in Kansas City. And then looking forward to final approval of the updated plan at the summer board meeting in New Orleans next June. I also want to report on a very successful set of activities around the development of ultra-high performance concrete. We put together a task group. It met in August. I think we covered this in the last update. But moving on from that, coming out of that workshop, was a list of short, medium, and long-term objectives that have been distributed to each of the councils, depending on their role in helping us to bring UHPC to the transportation and commercial markets in this country. We also hosted a one-day technical workshop the day before committee days. We had over 200 attendees between the in-person and online attendees and included many DOTs and university professors from around the country. So a very successful event. We got a lot of our committee day survey that we get from members were very complimentary and we look forward to continuing this work to bring this exciting new technology to market in the years ahead. As you know, PCI is pretty involved with government affairs in Washington, D.C. And something we've been working on for several years now, as many of you know, came to fruition and the president signed into law the bipartisan infrastructure bill yesterday. PCI was very involved going back to hill visits in the prior years to a virtual fly-in with many other associations in the concrete industry last spring. All through the summer and then certainly a big push during September. PCI was a part of a number of coalitions, part of many letters urging members of Congress to get this across the finish line. We were part of a group called the Transportation Construction Coalition that ended up coordinating and conducting over 150 virtual member visits throughout September as the construction community was pushing to get this accomplished. So I'll go through some of the provisions in this. We're going to post a much more thorough report on what's in the bipartisan bill in the members resources section of the website. You should be able to get that up here either later today or later this week. But I just wanted to hit a few of the highlights that are in the bill. First and foremost, it reauthorizes the FAST Act for another five years through 2026. You probably knew that the FAST Act expired on September 30th. Congress extended it through early December. So this takes care of funding in the transportation area for the next five years. It includes almost $298 billion for roads and bridges and that's up $68.5 billion from the previous FAST Act. So a significant increase in investment in our traditional roads and bridges infrastructure. It includes also, because the trust fund continues to be underfunded, it includes $118 billion from the general fund from Congress, $90 billion for highways and another $28 billion for mass transit. It does create a new program specifically to fund transportation resilience projects. So we've already been discussing this on the staff. We certainly will with TRAC as well to see how we might be able to position PRECAST to be part of that new program as well. And as I mentioned, the Highway Trust Fund continues to be underfunded as electric cars and hybrid vehicles continue to have gas tax revenues decrease. There was no increase in the gas tax increase, gas tax in this bill. It has not been increased since 1993, which is one of the reasons that the trust fund is consistently underfunded. But what this bill does do is put together a national per mile user fee pilot. These have been done in the FAST Act in the individual states. So it's a good move towards switching to a per mile user fee, which is eventually where we're going to have to get as electric cars continue to be a larger and larger part of the fleet. So that's good news as well. The bill does extend the Buy American provisions for steel and iron. It requires the Office of Management and Budget to, it does allow waivers. It requires OMB to set up rules and training of the federal staff as to how to conduct and review those waivers. And it also requires the General Services Administration to establish a buyamerican.gov website where products and companies can post their status as either having a waiver or being a substantially American made. There's a lot more in this bill, but one last piece I wanted to bring to the members attention is there is $310 billion for carbon capture and removal research and development. And the reason this is important is that they've specifically identified a number of industries that will be targeted to try to take advantage of this technology, one of them being Portland Cement. So as we continue to work to reduce the carbon footprint of concrete construction, this could be a very important step forward in removing or reducing that for the rest of the concrete industry since obviously cement has the largest carbon footprint of any of the ingredients. Moving on to an update on our strategic plan. I'll go through this rather quickly. As many of you know, it's broken down into six different goals, three goal zeros and three strategic goals. Our first goal, 0.1, is to continue to maintain and develop our body of and develop our body of knowledge. PCI's committee structures are hard at work on a number of different publications, some of which are planned to be national standards. Several of them are very close to completion. And some of them are slated in January to be presented to IBC for consideration to be referenced in the 2024 building code. I won't read through all of these, but we're very close to final balloting on the specification 135, on the piling standard, is that the standards committee, and a specification for precast concrete insulated wall panels, again, slated to be done in January so that we can submit that for code approval. It's very important that we make that window because we won't get another chance to get our standards referenced for another three years if we miss this code cycle. So congratulations to the standards committee and all the members and staff who are working so hard to meet those goals. We also continue to put out updated and new publications. Here's a list of some of the things that we recently put out. They're available in the bookstore, including an update to MNL 116 that's going to be, will be used in audits starting next year, and a complimentary design standard practice for ACI 318-14 that specifically goes through the precast elements in that code document. Other publications that are being worked on by the committees are a guide spec on ultra-high performance concrete, which is a very important complimentary publication to the research report that has recently been posted. So the research that PCI sponsored on UHPC is now available on our website. And we mentioned the precast insulated wall panels recommended practice, and a recommended practice on spun cast poles is also in the works. We continue to work on some of our other flagship documents. We're well into the latest cycle of the design handbook. An update to the bridge design manual is planned for completion next year. We're looking at updating the architectural precast concrete publication, but in a interesting and revolutionary new way, that publication is slated to be more of an online document than a traditional printed document that will allow us to link to various specifications, to BIM drawings, and additional information that wouldn't be able to be included in a printed manual. Our second goal zero is to maintain and advance our certification programs. A lot of exciting things going on since this last update. We do continue to offer online QC schools. There is one this week, and that continues to be very popular with the members. Just tremendous feedback on the win-win of being able to offer, especially the level one and level two schools online. As I mentioned, the MNL 116 update is in the bookstore. It got posted in July, and for all of the plant producer members who are on this call, we're going to be incorporating those changes in MNL 116 into the plant audits starting in January. The committee is currently working on the materials for a webinar and materials on the update that will be posted on the website for members. We're really excited to announce the launching just last week of our new certification management system. It has gone live, and I hope you get a chance to use it as you go through the process. We've moved everything online from the application all the way through verification and registration. Also online are the exams, and level one, two, and three in the GFRC are all live on exams, and the committee is working on updating the CFA and CCA. I want to give a shout out to Mike Kesselmeier and Ken Kulinski and Carolina on our staff and the members who worked so hard and those members who helped us debug the system. This is a great leap forward for us in terms of technology and getting all of the paper out of the process. We're looking forward to this very successful implementation of our new certification management system. If you go on the website, this is a new page that's been created that will give you all the information you need about the different aspects of it, and it plugs into an outside third-party management system that we've partnered up with. It's all available now on the website. As far as that goes, I do want to point out PCI's YouTube channel, and one of the things that the staff has been working on is producing a series of how-to videos for a whole lot of different functions that are on our website, but most importantly important to the CMS, there are several how-to exams or how-to videos on the YouTube channel that will walk you through the process of registering, signing up for the exam, and things along those lines. So that's also now available in the certification section. Another exciting piece on architectural is our new architectural certification program. This went live October 1st, after several years of very hard work of putting this groundbreaking new process together. So, as of October 1st, there are no more A-1s, and everyone who has had a chance, who has applied for their particular program, has at least had their initial audits, and we've switched them over to the A, A, A, B, A, C, or A, D. As you as members and the chapters go out and talk to architects about specifying the new program, there are some resources that are available on our website. One of them being this brochure that you can print out and hand out that explains the ins and outs of the program and also goes into some more details about what kind of features are part of the mock-ups that are used to qualify a particular producer in a particular category. So you can get an idea of some of the architectural features that might be most suited for each of those categories. The new PCI architectural cert is also now referenced in AIA's master spec. So I want to give credit to Randy Wilson and to the committee for helping us get that done. So it's now being specified with the new categories in master spec. Another exciting thing we've been able to roll out this fall is access for PCI producer members very easily and much less expensively to IAS AC-157 accreditation as an approved fabricator. What we've done is aligned the quality RQC program with the requirements of AC-157. We have a memo of understanding between us and AIS that sets that up. Anyone who's interested has just a little checklist that they have to go through for AIS. Then you make your application and send in the fee, and you will automatically be a IAS AC-157 certified as required in the building code. There is one additional piece, and here's the cost structure that we've put together. The IAS AC-157 does require two two-day audits. So plants that are interested in getting this accreditation who are currently only having one-day audits or a two-day audit and a one-day audit will need to step up to having two two-day audits. So that could result in extra fees. But this is the annual charge for getting this accreditation. You can see that we're offering a one, a three, and a five year with ever-reducing rates. For comparison, you can see over on the left what it would cost a producer to get this accreditation if they were to go to IAS by themselves. So it's less than half the cost, and we're really proud to be able to bring this opportunity to PCI producer members to further help them differentiate themselves in the marketplace from other non-PCI producers. Our third goal zero is to develop and maintain our IT platforms. And very quickly, I'll go through and mention some of the things that we've accomplished so far this year. We updated Committee Central at the end of August. A lot of good feedback from that. If you came to Committee Days or even if you didn't, I hope you've had a chance to check out the new PCI app. We continue to add features to that and functionality. We're getting good feedback from that as well. We continue to monitor and to update our How Precast Builds microsite, which is our outward-facing website to developers and contractors and specifiers on the advantages of Precast. We launched the Learning Management System back last year in 2020. I mentioned the CMS that we just launched. So our staff continues to do a great job of giving us these platforms that are really the key to our communication with you, the members, and to the specifying community. I do want to take this opportunity to congratulate PCI staff. Our website is based on a platform called IMIS, which is Association Software. And PCI was awarded just a few months ago, was a Great Things Award winner for excellence in design, navigation, and functionality of our website. So congratulations to that achievement to the PCI staff. We now move into our strategic goals. There are three of them, which we continue to go over on each of these updates because there's such a big commitment of the Institute. The first is, of course, to develop a Precast building code. That requires two steps. One is the purview of our design standard committee, where they are taking provisions out of the design handbook and other publications and turning them into mandatory language that can be referenced in a future building code. This is scheduled to be completed. The first version is scheduled to be completed with the next edition of the PCI handbook, which is scheduled to come out in December of 2023. As you know, we've also created ACI PCI 319 with ACI in order to bring our provisions as well as Precast elements that previously were in ACI 318, combine them together into a Precast code that we can take to IBC together. This work continues. ACI just had its convention a couple of weeks ago and progress is going very well on getting this first version of 319 published in 2025 to match the 318 schedule. So, this continues to be on track with the idea of getting it into the next building code cycle after it's published. Our second strategic goal is to increase the use of Precast concrete. Many, many things going on in this area, but I just wanted to share a few of them. Ascent continues to be our flagship document for the commercial and building community. We've got two very different versions. The print version continues to be well received, but the digital version also, as you can see, a much higher readership and the digital version allows us to include much more content and links from other stories. So, this continues to be a great vehicle that the Marketing Council is putting out there every year. They do plan out the future issues with their topics and you can see here, we've got the topics picked for the rest of the year and next year into 2022. We also continue to have a whole lot of education resources, monthly webinars that are including ones like these that are information for the members. Also, online webinars that will gain PDHs and CEUs for licensed architects and engineers. Our e-learning on the new LMS can get you that training on demand and we continue to have up the PCI Academy offering live multi-week schools. The current one finishes up this week. This is a screenshot of our learning management system. Very well received. Right now, we have over 100 different presentations available on the website. We also continue to, in other educational areas, and I'm proud to announce that PCI has been part of a couple of important presentations. We participated in the NIBS, Building Innovations Conference. Of course, it was online. Having a presentation on the use of 3D printed forms that came out of the research that PCI has conducted with Oak Ridge National Lab and GATE Precast also participated in that. And then for the second year in a row, PCI was the only concrete industry group that was part of Architectural Records Innovation Conference. This was the second year in a row that was the second year in a row that we were on the program, which includes keynotes by some world-renowned architects. And thanks to members Corey Grieka and Spring McEwen and staff Randy Wilson for the excellent presentation that they put together on total precast concrete to the architectural community. We also had our successful judging of our 2022 design awards. We had 72 buildings and 17 transportation. These award winners will be announced right after the first of the year, and of course will be presented in a special reception at the PCI convention in Kansas City. We also continue to pursue our opportunities in what we call earned media, where we get coverage in magazines and websites and such about precast projects or other information. This continues to be a priority for the marketing council and PCI staff. And as you can see at the bottom there, we are on track to get even more coverage of precast in various media outlets here in 2021 than we did in 2020. A lot of these are around the design award winners, so we get a lot of good coverage out of those as well. Oh, before I move on, um, if you as a member have any coverage, whether it's a TV, local TV news or local newspaper or anything that's covering one of your projects, please send it in to the marketing staff. We've got an extension extensive list and library of these earned media stories on our website, and we'd love to be able to add your project or other coverage to the library. Of course, the website also continues to offer all of our many publications. I would like to take that. We have a lot of free resources, but as a matter of PCI policy, if you have your companies guiding any specifiers to any of our resources, even if they're free, we need you to set up a link to our website so that we can capture their content information when they download those free resources. So that continues to be very popular as well. I mentioned earlier our How Precast Builds website. This continues to be our customer focused place to get information for various audiences or different markets. We are also, as part of beginning our efforts on workforce development, looking into adding a workforce development section of this microsite to How Precast Builds that could help attract folks to the industry. I want to take a minute just to plug PCI social media, ask everyone who's listening to follow us on these. We're not the biggest group in the world, but if we all follow each other, we get larger and larger scores in the social media universe. In the marketing area, I want to mention the work that's going on between PCI and FMI on an updated marketing study. This is an update in 2021 from a report that was originally done in 2016. This year is going to be a lot more extensive. That project is nearing to wrapping up and we'll have lots of great insight into what our customers are thinking about precast and how we position ourselves. This will be driving the marketing council into what our messaging is going to be. It also allows us to see how we're doing in terms of attitudes towards precast. The intention is to repeat this study every five years and see how we're making progress within the marketplace. Stay tuned for this, likely to be a webinar sponsored by the market research committee sometime in January. It will also be presented at the convention. Just really quickly, this gives you an example of the kinds of folks who answered the survey. A lot more architects than we had in 2016, so we got a good cross-section of specifiers and also a good cross-section geographically across the country. Again, stay tuned to the results of this. We look forward to hearing from the marketing council. Our last strategic goal is to enhance our members' businesses. For a year now, we've had this partnership with Optimum Safety Management. They have a whole number of value-added products and services that we can offer to members, including a safety helpline. I hope you're getting the monthly newsletter. We've got safety webinars that Optimum is putting on each quarter and access to an extensive toolbox talk portal. Optimum is also available free of charge to answer any questions that a member might have about an ocean inspection or anything like that that we can do with that safety helpline online or with a toll-free number. Optimum also continues to work with the Erectors Committee and the Plant Safety Committee. We've now developed 12 new precast-specific toolbox talks, six for the field and six for the plant. You can see those on the screen there. They are available on the PCI website and they will be continuing to offer 12 more of these next year. Continue to look at statistics of the members using these. I urge you as a member to take advantage of these products and services that are available. Optimum is also helping us out with the safety data project. Thanks to any members who are on who filled out that survey for us. We are also working with Optimum on developing a safety leadership workshop series that includes these topics. We're going to be including this on the PCI website under member resources. Look for this in the weeks ahead. I want to finish up with a project that we did with Optimum in looking at the actual ocean the actual OSHA database. We only get about 30 to 40 percent of members responding to the safety survey. Since this information is available to the public on the OSHA website, we wanted to do a little research project to see how PCI members stack up against the rest of the industry and with some other groups like manufacturing and construction. So we did a research. Data was compiled on days away or transferred the DART information or a total recordable incident rates, the TRIR for PCI. It was then compared to the precast producer, all precast producers and manufacturers. So we presented this to the board at a meeting in September and I wanted to share it with the membership. The first thing I want to pass along to the members is that we actually only had about 50 percent of PCI members who've actually completed this OSHA online survey. This is actually required by OSHA and failure to comply and enter your data for your company could end up in more than a $14,000 fine just for the initial lack of compliance. So I first and foremost want to urge any members who are on this update to make sure that your company has submitted information to the survey. So now let's look at some of the results. Overall our plant comparison is that our plants have a higher TRIR than both precast producers, which is the orange, and then manufacturing overall. So I anticipate that the board will be looking at safety, getting a significant upgrade in our strategic plan because we need to do better as an industry. Moving over to the field side, in this case the PCI erectors have a slightly lower TRIR than other precast erectors, but still a fair amount higher than construction overall. We also wanted to look at the dart data and unfortunately once again PCI plants have a higher dart than other precast producers or manufacturing overall. And on the erector side, PCI erectors have a lower dart than other erectors, but still higher than construction overall. So now that we've compiled this data, we've got a methodology for tracking this going forward in the future and seeing how we can improve on this as an industry. So that's just a little bit of a snapshot of the many many things that we have going on at PCI. I hope that we can see you all in Kansas City in March for the PCI convention, and with that I've got a few minutes to take any questions that anyone might have. Well Bob, it must have been very very informative and detailed because we don't have any questions. So I'd like to thank you for the great presentation. If anyone has any further questions after the webinar ends, 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.

webinar recording

Bob Risser

PCI Convention

Board of Directors

ultra-high-performance concrete

government affairs

certification programs

safety performance