G. Frederick Bohley
Management
Well, from an end user standpoint, obviously they're trying to sort out the general economic conditions, which are going to drive their business, obviously that varies by end market. If you take a look, school bus, the school bus end market was up tremendously in the second quarter, up 29% year-over-year, as we dig into that with the three major OEMs and as they have independently talked to us, they've indicated that they see a non-traditional shift from March through August, to one that's more like March through June. And certainly, we've seen as we were putting together this forecast, we certainly did that in the context of looking at what the orders look like for July and how that was shaking out and would appear, it supports a little bit of the – of maybe not their explanation, but certainly in terms of the net outcome. So, as we've taken a look at each one of the markets, tried to understand it, one of the things has probably driven our outlook for the remainder of the year, certainly has driven it the most is the OEM discussions we've had, relative to what their order boards look like, what they have done in some cases, where they have taken a shortfall in Class 8 tractor orders and used some of their production capacity to pull in medium duty in Class 8 straight truck. And so you would look at the build rates and ask yourself, well how was that going to play out the rest of the year and certainly, that's been the factor. Out of all of the customers and the plants that we have – that we track fairly closely is major consumers of Allison product. One of them is raising their line rate at least is their plan right now. The others have canceled – either lowered line rates or cancelled plans to increase their line rates and/or have added down days into the schedule. Now that can turn. They can turn around and we do a similar thing. We try to staff at a – to manage cost, we staff at a baseline. We were not staffed at the levels of schedules previously. We had over time days in. Because if the schedule moves down, it's easier to pull over time days than it is to try to move around labor, not only from an absolute cost standpoint, but the hidden cost of all the bumping that occurs when the contract terms for ship preference and job preference are played out, so it's a lot smarter way to go. So, really it's those factors that have played out here in recent weeks that have resulted in our update to the top line guidance.