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. Please 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 also 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 to begin our presentation. Well, good afternoon and welcome to this quarterly update. My name is Bob Risser. I'm President and CEO of PCI and I appreciate the opportunity to take a few minutes to tell you what's going on here at PCI. Let's get right into it. We had a very successful meeting last week with our 2022 committee days. We had almost 600 attendees, 188 producer members representing 60 different companies, 107 supplier associates from 49 different companies, and 210 individual members including 28 professors, 6 students, and 20 government officials. There was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about all the programs that are going on. I'm not going to spend much time today talking about all that, but for all of those of you who attended, thank you for your support. Thank you for your involvement in PCI. We couldn't do it without the involvement of the members. Speaking of committee days, just want to make a reminder that this is the last year we're going to be in Rosemont, Illinois for a while. As we've reported before, the board made a decision to start moving committee days around to different parts of the country and next year we're going to be in Tampa. And also please note that it's going to be slightly later. It's going to be the first week of October in Tampa. Very nice new JW Marriott there. The following year we'll be in Nashville, right near Broad Street. That should be a great, great venue. And then we're back in Rosemont again and then we'll start on a rotation of going from Rosemont to other locations and then back to Rosemont again. So again, thank you for all of you participating. Hope you'll be able to join us next year in Tampa. Just a few things to go over from our meeting last week, particularly some things that the Board of Directors is working on. The board continues to be focused on workforce development as a mega issue. Very important to all of our members. We had a presentation from a representative from the Manufacturing Institute. The gentleman outlined the programs that the MI is currently involved with. The Manufacturing Institute is a subsidiary of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Institute was created solely to try to attract and retain people in the manufacturing sector, which of course our plants would fall into. So we're looking to partner with them going forward on programs and tools that we might develop for use by PCI members in attracting and retaining employees. The board also approved an update to policy 28, which is the quality personnel certification. And I just wanted to let everyone know, since it could have some impact on your employees, the main change was that they lowered the waiting period after a failed exam to 14 days. It had previously been 60 days. So if the failed exam, the candidate can take it again after 14 days. And this applies to all of the personnel certification categories. They also approved the next Medal of Honor winner, the winner of the Mario Bertolini Award, and a group of 10 new PCI fellows. And of course, as always, they reviewed the Institute's finances. I won't go into those details, but I will tell you we had a very positive year in fiscal year ending June 30th and put another $375,000 to the good. Our reserves continue to be well above the target of 50%. So our finances are in very, very good shape. So the membership should understand how well the board is taking care of that. I also want to go through some upcoming events. First and foremost, in a couple of weeks we're resuming these production workshops. This is not the tour. The tour will be next May in Charlotte. But these are production workshops aimed exclusively at plant floor employees. The next one will be October 18th to the 20th in Milwaukee. International Precast will be hosting. And this year's subject is forming. The format is one day in the classroom and one day in the plants. And to go into detail about what your master carpenters and those processes have involved. The plan is to have next year's center on production and the year after that on finishing and patching. And this whole series is sponsored by the Architectural Precast Committee. So I encourage you to get on the website and register. And hopefully we will see you there. Other upcoming events. This year PCI for the first time is participating in Precast Days October 10th to the 21st. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute. Remind everyone that the 2023 convention will be February 22nd to the 25th in Columbus Ohio. Really looking forward to that. Great venue. The hotel is once again attached to the convention center. And plenty of restaurants and things to do in the area around the convention center. And as we mentioned earlier the 2023 productivity tour will be May 1st to 3rd in Charlotte. Registration for the productivity tour should open in that will open in the first quarter of 2023. So a little bit more about Precast Days. Precast Days is something that we've been talking about with the Canadian PCI and NPCA for a number of years. Our intention was to start off doing this in 2020 until COVID hit. So this is the first year we're doing sort of a soft launch. And what we're asking PCI members to do is to have some kind of event and that celebrates and showcases precast concrete and the industry sometime between October 10th and October 21st. It could be open houses that are used to grow the awareness, plant tours. Some of the past participants have used it to open it up to the communities in which they live and and show the folks around them what gets done in the plant every day. We ask you if you if you do decide to have an event to let us know so that we can keep track of that and to use social media to broadcast the event. And I'd also urge you that if you're going to have an open house of your plant, this is an election year and I would encourage PCI producers to invite their members of Congress to come by and meet the workers. You're a significant employer in their district and it would be very helpful to have them know about precast concrete. So we mentioned earlier about workforce development. As we outlined in our last update, the board or the Business Performance Council created a workforce development committee and they had their first meeting at committee days last week. We're very happy to have Aaron Clark with Standard Concrete volunteer to be the chair and the vice chair is Ben Grimsley with Carbon Cure. And Ben brings a particular passion to this effort since he is a veteran and is interested in how we might be able to attract folks coming out of the service to come to work for the precast and pre-stressed concrete industry. We're up to 16 members I believe on the committee and PCI rules allow up to 30 so membership is still open. If you or an HR person in your company is interested, contact Cody Call of our staff or get on the PCI website. There's an application form for joining a committee. We'd really like to have you involved. This is a very important topic. The meeting room was full. We had several members. We had the entire executive committee as well as a number of members of the Board of Directors in attendance that sort of underscores how important this is to the industry. Part of the discussion, there is a lot to sort out but part of the discussion concluded that this effort is going to not only be about attracting people to the industry and our member companies but also about developing programs and tools to keep them. So attraction and retention. We had a much longer presentation from the Manufacturing Institute and we're hoping to partner with them going forward in seeing what they have to offer that we can use without reinventing the wheel. They've been at it for about 12 years in trying to develop programs including veterans programs and other things that we might be able to tap into. The decision was made that there's so much to get our heads around on this that there was no way we were going to get that done in an hour and a half meeting. So the plan right now is to have a workshop for the committee in early December which essentially will be a strategic planning session, two days, breakout sessions where we essentially will bring together the committee members to decide what it is we want PCI to do, specific deliverables, and then prioritize those and then of course put any costs associated with that so that we can get moving on that. We also had a couple of demonstrations at the meeting of some things that the staff has had already put in progress. We have joined a group called Q Career which taps us into a network of 1,200 school counselors in high schools, vocational schools, and junior colleges around the country. That's not quite up live yet but we've drafted out the initial site and we've also started working on a PCI dedicated workforce development site that will start to mimic some of the things that have been done at some of our chapters, particularly the Mid-Atlantic chapter in following that model. I'd also like to take the opportunity to mention that there are workforce development opportunities available already for your current employees by getting involved in PCI so we encourage you to see if your product operations folks can participate in the productivity tour and the production workshop that's coming up in a couple weeks. We had a another very successful marketing and sales school back in June which was sold out and that committee intends to have another marketing and sales school again next year in 2023 so look for that as an opportunity to bring new folks in or to enhance the skills of your current people and get them involved in committees and task groups. That's a great retention method and of course I should have a bullet on this LPCI. LPCI just selected its next class which will have 24 people in it. I think that's the largest class that they've ever had so take advantage of that and then lastly the board has approved us moving forward at the 2023 convention with a student job fair. The history of this is we had a hundred students in Kansas City at the convention and 18 of them participated in the foundation's project precast. All of those hundred students are part of the foundation's university programs. We came to find out that 18 that had been in project precast every single one of them had gotten a job offer or or an interview from a PCI member by the time the convention was over and it got us to thinking what about those other 82 kids. So what we're going to do is set up an opportunity for PCI members to set up a little table you know in a pipe and drape thing in a section of the convention center and have the kids have the opportunity to come and visit you as a member about the opportunities to intern or to look at coming out of school and getting a job with your company. So we're going to be offering that as a workforce development opportunity at the convention in Columbus. I just want to take a few minutes to hit some highlights of some things that are going on within our strategic plan. In the last quarterly update I spent quite a bit of time going into depth about our technical activities. I'm not going to do that this time. There is a lot of progress. We were on track for ACI PCI 319. The next version of the handbook is very much underway as well as many other publications including the next version of the bridge design manual which we're hoping to have completed in early 2023. But I do want to tell you a little bit very recent right before committee days we got the news of an exciting project that I mentioned in the last update and that's this precast buckling restraint brace frame. This technology if we could bring it to market would make precast very competitive and highly seismic areas of the country. And the great news behind it is that this project grew out of some previous research and fellowships that PCI funded. But the great news is we just received word that we've received a two million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation that we leveraged with $400,000 from the PCI R&D fund. So that's a five-to-one leverage of PCI member resources on this on this project and we're hopeful we'll maybe even receive additional funding from the Charles Pankow Foundation. So just a great example of how our R&D fund can leverage enormous resources to help us move the technology of prestressed concrete forward. Some updates in the certification program. Just another update to our architectural AA and AB certified plants. The plan all along was to have a segment of this certification that required project surveys on projects of a certain size. This is going to be launched here in the fourth quarter of 2022. It'll be an online survey. It'll be available through the PCI website and it's for your architectural and general contractor customers. And the survey results will be brought back to the plant. It doesn't replace the plant customer satisfaction assessment so I just wanted to give a heads up to anyone on the call or on the webinar here who is an AA or AB certified plant. This is coming soon. It is a requirement of the program and there will be an agreed-upon surcharge that will be part due to cover the plants from the plants to cover the costs of this additional work. Moving on to our strategic goal 2. We're going to spend a fair amount of time here on increasing market share. So I just wanted to take a second unfortunately to report that the 21 sales that were reported by PCI member plants were down slightly in 2021 from 2020. Breaking a little bit of a not breaking a trend we had of doing better than construction overall. While I don't have a scientific assessment of this I think a lot of this downturn has to do with uncertainty but also the tremendous number of anecdotes I've gotten from members across the country of having to turn away work or not being able to get to work because of lack of people. So our workforce development issue is not just you know business performance council and helping our member companies but it's now an issue of us not being able to meet demand that's out there for precast and pre-stressed concrete. So even underscores the importance of the of the effort even more. I want to keep giving you some updates on how we're doing through the year, some of our metrics that we use to measure our success. Through September 12th, our website and our learning management system has had almost 223,000 page views, but I think more importantly, if you go down a couple of those, the courses completed so professionals, architects and engineers can get on our learning management system and take courses for credit towards their license. And even through September, we're already over 14,000 courses completed. We are only about 12,000 for the entire year last year in 2021. So we're continuing to make progress. That PCI's website and our learning management system is a tremendous resource to professionals in the design community. Some updates on our education programs, our QC schools. So we had some discussion of this endorsed by the Education Activities Council. So going forward, we're only going to have scheduled a small number of in-person QC schools across all the categories. They'll be at World of Concrete in January. There'll be one set of them in Chicago, and another set in Nashville. We're not exactly sure what time of year we'll try to spread those three around or World of Concrete will be in January, but we'll spread the rest out. And at this point, we are not going to schedule any other, pre-schedule any other in-person QC schools. Everything else will be online. We've had some issues lately with not being able to fill the in-person QC schools. We will offer in-person QC schools when they're specifically requested by a member or a chapter. But we do need, we are asking for a six-month notice when we schedule those in-person classes so that we can make the proper arrangements. And we're going to be looking for the local group sponsoring these in-person schools to guarantee that we're going to get a minimum number of participants. So the online schools continue to be a big success. In other news on the QC schools, the last of the exams is now online. We're completely paperless. So the CFA and CCA exams are now online. Updating things on the student education, a few topics that have been of very high interest to our members and to our chapters in the past few years from our student education committee. We're very happy to announce that the update to pre-stress in a box has been completed. It is currently at the TAC for review. And so we're certainly hoping to be able to bring that updated version of those teaching materials to make available to the universities, certainly by the end of the year, if not sooner. The second issue that has been talked about for many years is we've figured out a way to have a free electronic student version of the design handbook. It's an abbreviated version. It's not the full handbook. And we're working to complete the process of how do we deliver that, but that will be available just as soon as we can. It will be made available for the current version of the handbook. And then of course, when the next version comes out at the end of 2023, we'll have that version as well. Another big development that's ongoing, it's probably going to take a little while, but I wanted to let you know that a group of professors are in the process of developing a semester long set of presentations for a complete class in pre-stress concrete. It's 13 hour long presentations, and it will be supplementing what's already in pre-stress in a box. That will literally be a set of materials that can be adopted by a professor who's interested in teaching pre-stress at their university. So really some exciting education things coming up. Here is the schedule for quality control schools for the rest of the year. I won't read through them all. It's available on the website. So we've got those scheduled out. And I just want to repeat, we talked about this last time, but we now have a, since we're essentially switching to the QC schools being mostly online, we have a wait list function that we've added. If the classes that are scheduled fill up, we really need to limit the number of people even on the online schools. So we'll be watching this and if the wait list starts growing too much, then we'll add another online class as we go through the year. Also I'll mention the launching of this great new program, emphasizing the resilience of precast concrete. Precast protects life. You can see the link there. This is a link through our PCI, how precast builds microsite. And earlier this month, we've launched this entire program. We are looking for members to tell us about projects and videos or images that talk about storm shelters or other aspects of designing prestress and precast to protect against events. So we're really excited about going forward with that particular program. We continue to have our efforts on achieving earned media. So we've got a couple of highlights here recently. We were featured in the July version of Structure Magazine. They did a feature on the one of our design awards winners. And then we were in Colorado Construction and Design in their summer issue, an article authored by Jim Schneider, who's the executive director of PCI Mountain States. So that's just two examples of recent coverage. And we're working on with Parking Today Magazine to publish parking projects from our summer ascent issue. So you can see how we're tracking so far in 2022. Got some work to do the rest of the year to catch up to last year, but this continues to be a big emphasis of ours because it has so much impact, much better than paid advertising. So once again, I'd urge any members who get any kind of local coverage, whether it's TV news or local construction or newspaper coverage of a project, please let us know. We'll add it to the extensive database that we have on the PCI website. And this is just an example of some of the articles that have been written concerning PCI programs or precast projects just over the last few months. I'd also like to talk about this brand new tool, a video software tool that we made available on the PCI website, free of charge to PCI members. The tool allows you to easily upload video and other images. It allows you to do recordings and essentially make your own videos and YouTube videos for use in your company's marketing and promotion and social media activities. So we want to make sure that members will have access to their own videos and images, but nobody else's. And we really encourage you to use this tool. It's free, and as the marketing council has discussed many times, videos are the way best to communicate going forward. So we wanted to make that tool available to PCI members. There are YouTube videos on the PCI website about how to use this tool, but obviously you can contact the PCI marketing staff if you're interested or have any questions about how to use this for your company. So that's an update, a little bit of everything that's been going on. What I'd like to do for the rest of the update is to go through and acknowledge the awards that we gave out last week at committee days. So for those of you who are on the call here, who were at the lunch program, you will have seen this already. But I wanted to take this opportunity to go through and acknowledge the people and companies that we honored last week. So let me start with our Big Beam competition. The Big Beam competition was sponsored by ALP Supply and Aspire magazines. We want to thank them for that sponsorship. And so the overall competition winner was Team B from the University of Alabama. The Keith Kauffman Award for the best report goes to the team from Iowa State University. And the Big Beam video competition, the winner was Lehigh University, who teamed up with Northeast PreStress products. So congratulations to those teams of students, faculty, and the PCI producers who helped make it possible. Next is our Leslie D. Martin Certificate of Merit Award. This goes to the outstanding PCI technical document for its contribution to the industry. And there were several winners this year. The first was the Erector's Committee Task Group for their grouting white paper. The next group recognized was the Architectural Certification Subcommittee for the development of the PCI new architectural certification program. Congratulations to them. And lastly, to our Plant Certification Committee and Quality Control FAST team members for their update of M&L 116, which is the Manual for Quality Control for Plants. So congratulations and recognizing their efforts in bringing those technical documents to PCI body of knowledge. We'll next go through some of our journal awards. The Martin P. Korn Award is awarded in honor of PCI's first executive secretary, and it's for the best research paper in the PCI journal. This year's winners are for the factors affecting web shear capacity of hollow core slabs with filled cores, and it goes to Scott Esperheim of Minnesota Duluth and Ben Diamond with Northern Arizona University. Congratulations to them. The Charles C. Zolman Award goes, Charles, a little background, Charles Zolman was instrumental in developing equality, or he was instrumental in the design and construction of the Walnut Lane Bridge, which was the first pre-stressed concrete bridge in North America. He was also the first TAC chair from 1957 to 1960. So this award goes to the best journal paper, specifically targeting in on transportation, precast transportation structures. So this one goes to Jorn Remitz and Martin Empelman for their paper, High Cycle Fatigue Tests of Pre-Stressed Concrete Beams. Congratulations to them. The Robert J. Lyman Award, this is in honor of PCI's third president, and it goes to the best paper in the journal regarding production, construction, and or erection. And this year's winner was a team from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, along with a representative from Tyndall Corporation for their paper on structured light, three-dimensional scanning for process monitoring, and quality control in precast concrete production. So congratulations to that team. The George D. Nassar Award honors George Nassar, who was the journal editor for more than 30 years, and it's given to the best journal paper for authors under 40 years of age. This year's winner was Anwar L. Kamachki for his paper, Mechanical and Bond Properties of Grade 2205 Duplex High-Strength Stainless Steel Strands. Congratulations. The T.Y. Lynn Award was established in 1968, and it's presented every year by the American Society of Civil Engineers. It honors the legacy of the legendary structural engineer, T.Y. Lynn, who was also instrumental in the formation of PCI. And this year's award goes to a team from the University of Nebraska, E-Construct, and Kiewit Corporation for their work on flexural design of precast, prestressed, ultra-high-performance concrete members. Congratulations to them. The Erwin J. Speyer Young Professional Award was just created a few years ago, and it is in recognition of Erwin Speyer, who was very involved with PCI for many, many years. And it's awarded to recognized engineers early in their career who exhibit the personal and professional traits that Erwin Speyer exemplified. And we're proud to announce that this year's winner was Chuck Pisano with Pisano Consulting Engineers. Congratulations to Chuck. The T. Henry Clark Award honors T. Henry Clark, who was deeply involved in PCI quality programs and was involved in establishing the PCI plant certification and quality personnel certifications from the very beginning. And so we're proud to announce this year's winner is Dennis Fink with Northeast Pre-Stressed Products. Congratulations to Dennis and his commitment to the QC programs. And then lastly, we want to honor the Sidney Friedman Craftsmanship Award. This is in honor of longtime staff member, Sid Friedman, and it recognizes excellence in plants for craftsmanship and manufacturing of architectural precast and GFRC structures. So the award this year goes to Sidney, goes to the Orchard Project in Chicago, and the precast concrete producer was Lombard Architectural Precast Products in Elstead, Illinois. Congratulations to them. This was also one of our 2022 design winners as well. So congratulations to all of the award winners. And with that, I'd be more than happy to take questions on what was presented. And I thank you for taking the time to join us this afternoon. Thanks Bob for the great webinar and all the attendees. We have a couple questions. One question, the first one says the committee day's schedule slide in the presentation and the PCI website are different. Which one is correct? And I believe I can answer that question. The correct dates are the ones that are online, October 4th through October 8th. This is a very recent change. The second question we have is, is PCI doing anything to help members affected by Hurricane Ian? Well, I've been in touch with our Florida members this morning, and I'm happy to report that they have suffered no damage to any of the plants. It missed Tampa. We don't have any members on that Southwest coast, and it's going to miss Jackson. And so they're getting a lot of rain, and power has been out. But I've been in communication, as I said, with most of our members in Florida this morning, and they seem to be doing pretty, pretty well. Thank you. We have a another question here. So since we have reserved dollars over our policy requirements, are we going to fund programs cut during the budget reconciliation? We are. Well, one of the big questions on that is regard to workforce development. And so we're waiting to... That was one of the big items. The executive committee decided over the summer to not recommend that we go forward with any of the other at this point, since most of them were low and medium priority. That can be revisited. Any of the council chairs can ask that be done. In the meantime, we wanted to keep some money in reserve to fund workforce development programs once we get them identified, so that we can go forward in this fiscal year. All right. It looks like that's all the questions we have. Again, thank you, Bob, for the great webinar. Congratulations to all 2022 winners at committee days. All awards that were not picked up afterwards will be sent to recipients by the end of this week. As a reminder, there will be a pop-up survey after this program ends. If you have any further questions about today's webinar, please email marketing at PCI.org. Thank you again. Have a great day and please stay safe.

Bob Risser

PCI

Precast/Prestressed Concrete Institute

committee days

workforce development

education programs

awards