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spk00: and welcome to the Cooper Standard first quarter 2021 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following company-prepared comments, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. At that time, if you have a question, you will need to press star followed by the one key. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded, and the webcast will be available on the Cooper Standard website for replay later today. I would now like to turn the call over to Roger Hendrickson, Director of Investor Relations.
spk01: Thanks, Maddie. Good morning, everyone. We really appreciate you taking the time to join our call this morning. The members of our leadership team who will be speaking with you on the call this morning are Jeff Edwards, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and John Banas, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I need to remind you that this presentation contains forward-looking statements. While these statements are made based on current factual information and certain assumptions and plans that management currently believes to be reasonable, these statements do involve risks and uncertainties. For more information on forward-looking statements, we ask that you refer to slide three of this presentation and the company's statements included in periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This presentation also contains non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP financial measures to their most directly comparable GAAP measures are included in the appendix to the presentation. So with those formalities out of the way, I'll turn the call over to Jeff Edwards.
spk02: Thanks, Roger, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate the opportunity to review our first quarter results. and provide an update on our ongoing strategic initiatives and outlook. To begin, on slide five, we provide some highlights or key indicators of how our operations performed in the quarter. In the critical areas of providing quality products and services to our customers and keeping our employees safe, we continue to perform at world-class levels. At the end of the quarter, 98% of our customer scorecards for product quality were green, and 98% were green for launch. Most importantly, the safety performance of our plants continues to be outstanding. Through the first three months of the year, our total safety incident rate was just .45 per 200,000 hours worked, below the world-class rate of .57. I would like to specifically recognize and thank our teams at the 44 Cooper Standard plants that had a perfect safety record of zero reported incidents in the first quarter. We're continually striving for zero safety incidents at all of our plants and facilities, and these 44 are leading the way and clearly demonstrate that achieving our goal of zero incidents is possible. From a financial perspective, our results were nearly on track with our original operating plan for the quarter, despite the number of external challenges. Semiconductor shortages, historic winter storms and power outages, and disruption of natural gas and other commodity supply issues resulted in abrupt changes to production schedules that impacted volumes on some of our key platforms. Through the uncertainty, our teams have pulled together to deliver $18 million of manufacturing cost savings in the quarter, offsetting the impact of the volume lost. In addition, our continued aggressive actions to reduce overhead costs and optimize our supply chain resulted in a $10 million improvement in SG&A and E expense. and $10 million in purchasing savings versus the first quarter of last year. Combined, these initiatives were a significant factor in achieving a 450 basis point improvement in our first quarter adjusted EBITDA margin.
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