Michael D. Lockhart
Management
Okay, well let me take the manufacturing productivity first. Clearly in North American Brazilian, we have a history of getting pretty good productivity in sort of the 3% to 8% range. Clearly when we get it at the high-end of that range, it comes from shutting facilities and we have four vinyl tile plants, two sheet plants, six solid wood plants, and four engineered plants, and that’s down substantially from what it was a couple of years ago, and so closing plants has helped us eliminated fixed cost and get good manufacturing productivity. In addition, we also improved the basic production process. So in the wood business, for example, we’ve improved our yields by drying more of the wood ourselves and doing a better job of drying it and it’s -- we found that we get 2% higher yields with wood we dry than when we buy it dry. Things like that have helped us a lot. And we see the same thing in our flooring business in Europe. The biggest change for us in terms of manufacturing productivity is in the ceiling business, where we always got around 1% productivity. We brought in a new manufacturing leader and the guy running the North American ceilings business put a greater emphasis on process improvement and plant performance and we’ve seen just basic blocking and tackling improve substantially in the ceilings business. We have better up-time in the plant, better yields, and it’s turned [its lid] to productivity. On the mix side of things, it kind of varies by product line. Sometimes it’s because we are selling a product form, which is higher value. So if you are looking in Europe, we’re selling more LVT, which is a luxury vinyl tile, which is a higher product, or higher price, higher margin product. Other times certainly in ceilings and the -- we have a tendency to sell higher priced, more designed products. There is a part of the ceiling business we call architectural specialties, which really are specialty items -- wood ceilings, metal ceilings, different trim details, that stuff. That business is growing double-digits and has for the last several years and gives us an opportunity to improve mix substantially. So those are the kinds of things that are driving mix. We would expect architectural specialties to grow but not as much relative to the business because as we see the markets turn down, we see more cost engineering go down. And we are seeing somewhat -- in the floor business, we are seeing somewhat of a tendency towards the lower priced products. Now when I say that, we do have some new products, like high gloss laminate, which is a very high-priced product that’s been growing just gangbusters for us and it’s been helping the mix. We expect that to continue because right now we pretty much are the only game in town in terms of that product line.