Avis Budget Group, Inc. this month celebrates the fifth anniversary of its award-winning performance excellence process-improvement initiative, which has helped the company generate more than $275 million in annual cost savings and other benefits since the program was launched in 2007.

Avis Budget’s Performance Excellence initiative, informally known as “PEx,” is led by a dedicated full-time team of Company employees from across the organization’s regions and functions, using Lean and Six Sigma methodologies to make vehicle rental processes more efficient and standardized, saving money, enhancing the customer rental experience and boosting employee morale. The savings brought about through Performance Excellence have offset inflationary cost increases, generated incremental cash flow to be invested back into our business, and helped the Company achieve the record results it reported in 2011 and that it projects for 2012.

“Performance Excellence has exceeded all of our expectations over the last five years. In addition to continuing to be an important strategic initiative for Avis Budget Group, PEx has become part of how employees worldwide think about our business every day,” said David B. Wyshner, Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Avis Budget Group. “As a result, this anniversary not only honors our achievements to date, but also celebrates the robust pipeline of projects that the PEx team will undertake in the months and years to come, which is a testament to the dedication and involvement of our entire employee population.”

Since Avis Budget Group’s acquisition of Avis Europe plc last October, the Company has begun expanding PEx to Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia (EMEA), making this a global effort.

“We have added PEx team leaders in each of our major countries as well as back-office support facilities within our EMEA operations,” said David Myers, Senior Vice President, Performance Initiatives and PEx’s Deployment Leader from the start. “With the help of our local management teams and employee groups, we have identified and launched more than 50 new projects.”

Avis Budget Group Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Ronald L. Nelson marked the occasion, saying, “I want to extend my congratulations to our Performance Excellence team for achieving outstanding results through the deployment of PEx and to all of our employees around the globe for making PEx such a strong and sustainable effort. The commitment and enthusiasm of both our management team and front-line employees have played such a critical part in enabling us to be able to successfully initiate and implement hundreds of new projects each and every year of our first five years, and I am confident that we will maintain this momentum over the next five years of PEx.”

Avis Budget Group’s PEx initiative was recognized by the Global Six Sigma Improvement Awards in 2008, when Avis Budget Group won Best Organizational Achievement in Lean Enterprise Improvement.