Peugeot Opens Technical Assistance Platform in Malaysia
Automobiles Peugeot today officially added a fifth site to their global Technical Assistance Platform network which provides technical assistance for all Peugeot vehicles. The new site in Cyberjaya, Malaysia, joins the other four which are located in Nantes (France), Manchester (UK), Coventry (UK) and Saarbruken (Germany).
The Technical Assistance Platform in Cyberjaya is managed with IBM Malaysia and is intended to serve the Asia-Pacific region. This means that the technicians will receive calls from many different countries with different languages and the Cyberjaya unit is able to communicate in Bahasa Malaysia, English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Thai and Bahasa Indonesia. This brings the total number of languages that Peugeot’s Technical Assistance Platform worldwide ‘speaks’ in to more than 20.
“The reason for Peugeot to create such a facility was because customers were found to increasingly seek more security, more comfort, and more convenience in the use of their vehicles. These expectations could not have been be satisfied using traditional electrical architecture that would lead to unaffordable costs for customers but also have the critical situation in after-sales that would come from the tremendous amount of wirings inside the vehicle,” explained Christian Moreau, Director of Technical Support at Peugeot.
He was referring to the use of multiplexing technology for electrical connections, a technology which originated in the aerospace industry that allows for vastly more efficient communications between systems, and at higher speeds too. Peugeot was the first non-specialist carmaker to use multiplexing when it introduced this in the 1999 406 model. Today, multiplexing allows some Peugeot models to have four LANs inside the car which link up to 30 computerised systems.
The Technical Assistance Platforms are able to communicate with the computerized systems from their remote locations and utilize the 8,000 diagnostic tools available to identify problems and assist technicians to find solutions.
Of the Cyberjaya site, Mr Moreau said that it was chosen because of its image as “the most intelligent city” and Peugeot found it appealing for its unique blend of tropical eco-friendly environment with the latest IT infrastructure and facilities, as well as ideal business and living conditions.
He revealed that since start of operations on October 15th, the Cyberjaya site has received 760 telephone calls and 130 e-mails. 80% of all requests have been solved directly while 20% required further consultation with a site in France which has 23 experts to assist in finding solutions for especially difficult problems.
The establishment of the Cyberjaya site to serve the Asia-Pacific region is the third facility which has been set up by Peugeot, the others being the ASEAN Regional Office in Kuala Lumpur and a Regional Training Centre in Petaling Jaya, Selangor.
