Is business ready for this?

Every weekday morning at 8, a team of executives at French carmaker PSA Group gathers in a room an hour’s drive west of Paris.

Others dial in remotely, and for the next few hours, the team huddles to plot a path out of the massive supply-and-demand crisis caused by the new corona virus ripping through the global economy.

For a well-oiled machine like PSA, with its 173,000 employees, multiple brands including Peugeot, Citroën, and Opel, and parts sourced from 6,000 suppliers around the globe, the risk of disruption is significant. Each car is typically made up of 4,000 components delivered just in time for final assembly. Just one missing item can have devastating consequences for an entire vehicle plant, slowing or forcing changes to manufacturing and output or even grinding a complete line to a sudden halt.

So when the virus brought China’s car parts industry to a standstill, and the seriousness of what was happening in locked-down Hubei province became clearer, PSA switched into crisis mode. It settled on one location to pool together senior managers and help them devise an action plan, says Maxime Picat, PSA’s head of Europe. “We chose one room and called it the war room,”  he says. “We said war because we wanted people to understand that the pace of what happens inside has to be different from normal.”