Dana has taken a leadership role in the implementation of e-business with our supply base. We gained significant knowledge and developed some expertise, partly because we felt that's what we needed, to be prepared to conduct e-commerce with our customers. For example, working with Ariba and Aspect, we coordinated our purchasing function among 287 different sites. That's just within Dana. 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.
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. 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. Washing machine manufacturers, for example, didn't invent the assembly line process they use to make their products nor the vehicles used to ship them.