Cooper-Standard Holdings Inc.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Cooper Standard first quarter 2022 earnings conference call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Following the company's prepared comments, we will conduct a question and answer session. At that time, if you have a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the one key. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded, and a 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.

Thanks, Kevin, and good morning, everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to join our call today. 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 they 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.

those formalities out of the way i'll turn the call over to jeff edwards thanks roger good morning everyone we appreciate the opportunity to review our fourth quarter results and provide an update on some of the key initiatives that will shape our broader business outlook to begin on slide five we provide some highlights or key indicators of how our operations performed in the quarter we continued to execute at world-class levels in delivering quality products and services to our customers and keeping our employees safe. At the end of the quarter, 99% of our customer scorecards for product quality were green, and 96% were green for launch. Most importantly, the safety performance of our plants continues to be outstanding. In the first quarter, our total safety incident rate was just 0.39 for 200,000 hours worked, well below what is considered world-class and outperforming our target rate of 0.40. I would like to specifically recognize and thank our teams at the 42 Cooper Standard plants that maintained a perfect safety record of zero reported incidents for the quarter. We are continually striving for zero incidents at all of our facilities, And the dedicated, focused employees at these 42 locations are leading the way and continue to demonstrate that achieving our ultimate goal of zero incidents is certainly possible. Despite lower than expected production volumes, our manufacturing operations and purchasing teams were able to deliver $19 million in savings through lean initiatives and improving efficiencies in the quarter. Our SGA and E expense was down $6 million year over year as we continue to right-size our fixed costs. And past restructuring actions delivered $3 million in benefits in the quarter. Unfortunately, we continue to face significant ongoing challenges from volatile customer schedules, reduced production volumes, tight labor availability in certain markets, and hyperinflation during the quarter. In this low production volume environment, the improved operating efficiency only partially offset the widespread inflationary impacts we're seeing in materials, energy, transportation, and labor. This is why we're continuing to take aggressive actions to mitigate or recover the incremental costs imposed on our business. I'll provide more color on our progress in a few minutes. Despite all the headwinds and volume remaining well below our plan, we saw month-to-month improvement as the quarter progressed and we were cash flow positive in the month of March.