We can eliminate a significant amount of waste that way, but it also made us better prepared, so when we signed up with Covisint, and other customer exchanges, we had an infrastructure in place internally that could maximize our efficiency in conducting e-business. I think this will be true for a lot of suppliers a study commissioned by the Original Equipment Suppliers Association concluded that only 15 percent of the total savings from a Covisint-type exchange would be procurement driven, while 85 percent would come from supply chain and process improvement. Suppliers Association concluded that only 15 percent of the total savings from a Covisint-type exchange would be procurement driven, while 85 percent would come from supply chain and process improvement. The phrase used in the title of today s session Fasten Your Seatbelts, is a pretty good way of summarizing the state of the auto industry today. I talked earlier about how anything that used to take us a year to change, now we have to do it in a few months that s really the major difference between the dot com era and the history of our industry.
Time compression is the major issue today.
Just think, in the early part of the twentieth century there were more than fifty OEMs in the U.S. alone. Their valuation was high compared to established companies of the time then came the inevitable shakeout and consolidation. Today we can imagine going to six or seven OEMs worldwide, and the technology is widely diffused. What took nearly a century to happen in our industry is happening in a decade or so today with the dot coms. But, it is not only industry participants who benefit from the technology.