Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Tom Hayes - Piper Jaffray.
Tom Hayes - Piper Jaffray
I was wondering if it's possible to provide a little color on the impact that pull through on the back orders had. You mentioned that people were maybe accelerating their anticipated delivery date. I was wondering if you could provide a little color on that impact?
Norman C. Chambers
You know, it's a very difficult thing to calculate precisely, but we clearly saw some movement. We would guess that it's maybe something on the order of $20 million, but it's a real rough guess. But it kind of looked to us anecdotally that it's on the order of $20 million.
Tom Hayes - Piper Jaffray
There didn't appear to be any debt paydown in the quarter. Do you expect that there will be some further paydown in 4Q, where you typically have a strong cash flow position?
Norman C. Chambers
We would like to accumulate cash to have that flexibility, that's for sure. As Mark said, very similar to 2004 when the steel prices increased, we've had to invest more in our steel inventory, so that sucked up a little bit of cash. But we'd expect to start to see that come back in the fourth quarter. So we'll accumulate some cash and then decide on what we need to do as we go into the banking period.
Tom Hayes - Piper Jaffray
And then I guess just lastly, if you look at the great margin performance in the Components segment, excluding the $1 million impact, could you just give a little more color as to what may have also driven that positive growth in the margins?
Norman C. Chambers
I've got to tell that it's clearly the case that this 6% drop in our operating expenses really drove some efficiencies. They were able to do a whole lot of things on improvement of scrap, as Mark Dobbins had mentioned, but commercial discipline and the quick-turn nature of their business enables them in the Coaters Group to perform well in rising steel price environments. And what we find is that as steel prices begin to flatten or come down a little bit, that we'll see some stabilization in our Coating and our Components Group, and we'll see improvement in the Buildings Group as their backlog catches up with the pricing. But commercial discipline's a hugely important thing to us.
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