Avis Budget Group Realizes $65 Million in Incremental Benefits From Performance Excellence Initiative in 2011

Avis Budget Group

today announced details of the ways that its award-winning Performance Excellence process-improvement initiative contributed to the Company's financial results in 2011, including its record levels of Adjusted EBITDA in the first nine months of the year. (Avis Budget Group will report fourth quarter and full-year 2011 results in February.) Working closely with all facets of the organization, the Company's Performance Excellence, or "PEx," team applied proven tools such as Lean and Six Sigma on more than 500 different project deployments in 2011. These projects focused primarily on enhancing operational efficiency, driving incremental revenue, reducing fleet depreciation and fleet maintenance costs and improving the Avis and Budget customer experience. In total, the PEx initiative helped generate more than $65 million of cost reductions and revenue enhancements in 2011 compared to prior-year results. "We are delighted not just with the stellar results achieved by our PEx initiative, but also with the way our entire organization has embraced Performance Excellence as a powerful means to improve operational efficiency throughout the Company," said David B. Wyshner, senior executive vice president and chief financial officer. "We are confident that our process-improvement efforts will continue to help us identify ways that we can serve our customers better and at lower cost in 2012 and beyond."