Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Thank you sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. (Operator Instructions) Our first question comes from Margaret Woolever of Raymond James. Please go ahead.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi. I was wondering that when you're looking at improving costs, could you give a little bit more insight on how you plan -- rationalizing costs and maybe quantify the benefit range or targeting for operating expenses?
Jeffrey McParland
Well, we had talked about this some on our year end call. Basically when we see commodity prices collapse, a lot of our services operate in the same areas as the producers who supply our system. They go after their costs with a vengeance and rather than being a follower, we engage at the same time. What does that mean? That means going back to vendors and reopening contracts and resetting rates or it means being aggressive of opportunity of supplies, we ran -- 10-inch pipe last year. We purchased at same price but something like 25 to 30% less and actually have gotten 12-inch pipe at the same cost this year. So we're seeing substantial reductions in the cost of supply.
That simply requires discipline through our consumer process to go after those improvements. We've an ongoing program of operational, our management looking to our area managers that we started back in August of last year. Once we finish around with them, we'll start that over again and go through each of their budgets, their plans, their activities to make sure we're optimizing our approach to running the business.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. Great. Thank you, that helps. And on the maintenance CapEx you said it will be about 40% of 55 million, so I think that this will be back operated?
Jeffrey McParland
Oh, yeah, we saw 2.6 in the first quarter. So that will spread more evenly over the rest of the year. We've had a pretty good track record of being conservative in on CapEx estimates. Our operating folks tend to keep their budgets intact even though they might not be actually running at that kind of expenditure level. So, we expect there is probably more biased downwards than upwards, barring a significant organic growth project on that CapEx forecast. But pro rata remaining years is a reasonable assumption.
Unidentified Analyst
Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator
Our next question comes from Helen Rayu with Barclays Capital. Please go ahead.
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