The Wheels | ALD Automotive Global Alliance: Marking 10 Years of Continued Coverage, Culture & Control 

As global product director at Wheels, my job is to enhance the innovation solutions delivered and advance the global discussion between Wheels and ALD Automotive. While I’ve only been in my current role for a few months, I’m not new to the relationship. I’ve held various roles within ALD in the past 12 years. As a result, making the switch was not only a natural fit, it helped solidify the shared mission of the Wheels ALD Global Alliance.

Since 2009 when the alliance was established, much has taken place. We’re now present in 55 countries with more than 2.1 million vehicles on the road. We’ve helped countless clients navigate divergent ecosystems, with varying laws, business practices, vendors and partners, while providing a true global solution with the right governance structure to leverage specialized regional and local expertise. To facilitate this, while offering insight to clients, we also developed robust reporting capabilities.

However the success of the global alliance is, at least in part, attributed to the core tenets underlying every conversation, negotiation and business activity taking place: coverage, culture and control.

With all that’s been accomplished over the past decade, we’d like to reaffirm these principles. In honor of the decennial anniversary, here is an examination of the strategic levers established to support our clients’ growth.

Comprehensive Coverage

International development requires having a partner that can support you with the right local market expertise. But coverage goes beyond countries. Coverage means the scale and the expertise to leverage the ecosystems available in those countries and regions, because there is a wide range of maturity differences in the various markets. As an alliance, we are able to finance and provide a full service solution that captures the total cost of ownership of the fleet in all markets. But you cannot be world class if you’re not excellent at the local level. Having the knowledge of the environment and culture of the region, helps not only develop a framework to facilitate our clients’ success, but proactively address differences in fleet operation.

With some of our largest customers present in more than 50 countries, our goal is to provide a coordinated approach with the ability to leverage local fleet ecosystems, drive consistency when needed and optimize overall global performance to execute our customers’ strategy.

Collaborative Culture

The alliance and many of our global clients share a commitment to customer-centered business practices. Our experience is that clients expect sustainable development that is focused, passionate and curious about new ideas that are proactively shared in a consultative and collaborative way. Addressing another aspect of culture, we organize global gatherings in Latin America and Europe and during Global Fleet conferences to share relevant news, exchange best practices and discuss industry trends.

Complete Control

The extensive scope of global organizations also means that clients need control. For global fleets, it can be difficult to see, track, measure and improve key cost and value drivers that impact performance, such as safety, carbon emissions, and vehicle cost. With this in mind, we jointly invested in data mining and retrieval technology to provide extensive oversight through a consolidated reporting tool. Our global clients benefit from ALDnet.com, our digital fleet management platform that we update each year. Clients use the platform extensively to manage their fleet at global, regional and local levels and have access to multiple dashboards and indicators, including the capability to drill down at individual-vehicle levels across all countries, whether the lessor is ALD Automotive, Wheels or a partner of the alliance.

GlobalFleetReporting.com is another tool developed by the alliance, that we’ve made neutral by transferring it entirely to an independent platform to enable fleet managers to receive multi-vendor, high-level operational and financial reporting from their entire global fleet.

We’re proud of what the alliance has achieved over the past 10 years, which is the most complete, strategic and farthest-reaching global network in the industry. We look forward to many more years of providing our multinational clients with harmonized services and market-specific expertise and insight to deliver performance and value across the alliance.