Got this from the last earnings call followed by the Investors Q&A. If it is not clear to you the direction of DXC and what role you play in that future....
James Schneider - Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe, if you talked about the $1 billion in year one synergies, I think, at the Investor Day, you talked about workforce and supply chain being about $700 million of that and Paul thanks for sharing the color on the progress in the first quarter. As we think about the cadence for Q2, can you give us any kind of sense about what to expect there? Is it something that we should be expecting kind of to get to the $250 million range? Or any color there will be helpful.
Paul N. Saleh - DXC Technology Co.
Yeah, I think you're pretty close to the number, we'll see certainly is it somewhere in the $75 million, $80 million of additional actions. And many of them coming in again from the permanent combination of procurement and labor savings. But labor saving is not just workforce optimization. We're looking at converting some of our external labor where it makes sense particularly in certain skill set and particularly in certain geography.
At the same time we're continuing to use automation as an opportunity to just really drive greater efficiencies in our labor force, and that is not just in high cost market, that's also showing up in our low-cost markets. And the other thing that's a great opportunity for us that we're just really starting to embark on is the pyramid. working just making sure that we've had the first phase of management layer elimination, but we have still to continue to attract younger talent in the right location and continue to develop the talent that we have and give them opportunity to expand their capabilities.
John Michael Lawrie - DXC Technology Co.
Yeah. I think that's a good answer, Jim. I mean it's not a small deal to remove four layers of management in 90 days. And what we have found, and this goes back to the first question that Arvind asked, is we did find a fair amount of overlap. That was the working thesis behind the merger of the two companies that there were significant synergies there. And I think the key point is we are finding those synergies. We're executing fairly expeditiously against those, while at the same time, while at the same time investing in the future. So we're making a big investment in automation and what we called bionics. So that investment is being made. We're making a big investment in nearshore. So we're taking a look at building a low-cost delivery center in the United States that would support not only our commercial business, but our USPS business.
We had a very strong graduate recruiting program this year. So we're bringing in a lot of kids. We're looking at internships and co-op programs and investing in training and re-skilling of our people. So I don't want anybody to think this is just about taking costs out. I mean, we took quite a few people out in the first quarter, but we also hired 6,000 people in the first quarter, 6,000, okay. And we need to do that to continue to refresh the workforce. So there is a lot of activities here, Jim, and you can see there is a lot to execute against, but we feel pretty comfortable that we have got a handle on the plan and we're going to continue execute.