Improving car body production at PSA Peugeot Citroën

In 1998, following a change in top management, the new CEO of PSA Peugeot Citroën decided to adopt a triple-axis strategy of growth, innovation and profitability and set an ambitious target for each. To meet these objectives, PSA decided to focus on the car-body shops, which were the bottlenecks of its plants. An R&D team conducted a project to support car-body production for PSA Peugeot Citroën. PSA manufactures over 75 percent of its cars on lines designed and continually improved with the team's new analytic operations research tools. These OR tools, which combine simulation and Markov-chain models of series-parallel systems, have improved throughput with minimal capital investment and no compromise in quality – contributing US $130 million to the bottom line in 2001 alone. The impact of this project went beyond the boundaries of PSA as its suppliers acquired the tools without being requested to do so.