New Faurecia TechCenter Dedicated to Automotive Seating

NANTERRE, FRANCE – October 12, 2011: Faurecia, the world's leading manufacturer of automotive seat frames and mechanisms and number three in complete seats, today opened a new TechCenter at its long-established Brières-les-Scellés site in the Essonne region of France. Representing an overall investment of €5 million, the new facility is a center of technological excellence, innovation and development in automotive seating designed to foster creative ideas and boost the Group's competitiveness.

The Brières-les-Scellés TechCenter is organized into five main complementary areas:

Applied seating development: Responsible for the seating development program from the point when the contract is awarded by the automaker. It covers all functions required to achieve performance, quality, cost and lead-time objectives, namely engineering, validation, quality control, costing, purchasing and production planning. Teams in this division will gradually transfer their work to the production sites where they will assist the production start-up teams onsite.

Innovation Plateau: A 450-sqm shared environment designed to foster creativity, create synergies and encourage the exchange of ideas giving rise to the automotive seating of the future.

Seating Engineering Academy: Brières-les-Scellés has taken the unprecedented step of devoting a special area to seating training: the Seating Engineering Academy. A total of 60 employees, experts and in-house specialists can be mobilized to teach more than 100 training modules. The Academy is open to Faurecia engineers and technicians worldwide and can also be turned into a place where the customer’s teams can come to discuss and learn about Faurecia Automotive Seating methodologies and processes.

TechForum: A permanent, modular showcase for Faurecia Automotive Seating innovation offering an overview of the latest product developments. It gives an idea of the scope of the Business Group’s know-how in all segments of the market, particularly its expertise as an integrator, with control over the entire seating value chain, from the production of discrete mechanisms through to the delivery of complete seats.

FrameTech: A platform dedicated to the definition of new standards for front seat frames. In concrete terms, it is a facility for developing prototypes in real conditions, giving designers an opportunity to work with process teams in a proper production environment. FrameTech houses an experimental generic seat frame assembly line, to study the process of attaching the seat back to the base. Benefits include optimized assembly time, a seat frame 25% lighter, production start-up costs cut by two-thirds, and improved productivity and quality.

Faurecia Automotive Seating has a network of five TechCenters worldwide. Those located in Stadthagen (Germany), Brières-les-Scellés (France), Shanghai (China) and Troy (Michigan, USA) are dedicated to complete seats and seat frames while the Caligny plant (France) concentrates on seat mechanisms.

The Brières-les-Scellés site also houses the Southern Europe Operations Division and the central departments of Faurecia Automotive Seating as well as departments shared with other Business Groups.