Pictured: Beat Imwinkelried, CEO of Auto-Interleasing
Switzerland’s largest independent leasing company, Auto-Interleasing, based in the capital Basel, is able to exactly meet the ‘green fleet’ needs of its fleet customers, thanks to Miles from Sofico.
An increasingly important trend among Swiss fleet operators is the requirement to have detailed CO2 reports to meet statuary and internal reporting requirements. This means having the ability to identify the total carbon output of the fleet and the average CO2 emissions of all the vehicles on the fleet at several levels.
The company MD or CEO may require management information giving a helicopter view of the business, showing the headline figures in hard copy report. The fleet manager and other line managers may require more detailed information regarding specific vehicles and their drivers in hard copy or online. Meanwhile, the company finance director may want access to the raw data online 24/7 for a variety of purposes.
The depth, flexibility and scope of Miles’ reporting suite allows Auto-Interleasing to produce this level of customized reporting and management information to exactly meet the needs of each individual customer and to fulfill the specific requirement of each level of the business.
Beat Imwinkelried, CEO of Auto-Interleasing, who has overall responsibility for a managed fleet of between 12,000 and 13,000 cars, said: “Without Miles, we probably wouldn’t exist today. Its flexibility, great reporting depth and the accessibility of the data it holds has given us a USP in our market. “This allows us to tailor-make our solutions to exactly meet the needs of our fleet customers, while our competitors have to rely on a less-specific, standardized approach.
“Miles is very sophisticated and allows us to provide fleet management on a large scale on the one hand, and yet to drill down and provided detailed reports of every aspect of the business on the other.
“Green reporting has assumed increased importance in Switzerland in recent years, and we now see companies incentivizing their drivers to select greener cars, while penalizing those that select more polluting models. So, it is important to identify the individual CO2 outputs of all models on the fleet.”
Beat Imwinkelried also explained that companies increasingly wanted their management information to mirror that of their organizational structure.
“This might require one report for head office, another for each division, and then another for each business unit within each division. Miles gives us the flexibility to be able to do this,” he said.
Another advantage of Miles’ flexibility was its capability to provide tax information for individual drivers of each customer’s organisation. Switzerland is divided into 26 separate cantons, each with their own variation of company car tax laws, while Auto-Interleasing also manages vehicles in Lichtenstein.This means the requirement to provide information for drivers’ tax bills based on the location of their car throughout 27 different areas with their own tax rules, which creates an almost infinite number of permutations.
“Again, this is something that the flexibility of the Miles system allows us to do for each fleet customer and helps us provide a first-rate level of customer service,” said Beat Imwinkelried.
Formed in 1949, Auto-Interleasing is Switzerland’s oldest leasing company with both national and international corporate customers operating fleet sizes between one and 800 cars. However, Miles was recently instrumental in helping the company win its largest ever client, a company which operates around 2,000 vehicles.
The company wanted a mileage management system that would allow it to record the exact monthly costs for each car on the fleet, based on a pre-agreed matrix of prices linked to the actual kilometers driven during the month. Business mileages were captured directly from the driver or fleet manager based on odometer readings, or downloaded from an in-vehicle telematics ‘black box’ straight into Miles.
This then created a total monthly cost per vehicle that could be allocated to a specific internal project to provide a complete cost picture.
A pilot was set up with 160 of the company’s vehicles, and at the end of it, the company was so pleased with the outcome and the service provided by Auto-Interleasing, that it agreed to become its largest-ever fleet customer. “Without Miles, we most definitely would not have won that client,” said Beat Imwinkelried.
Auto-Interleasing, which also runs branches in Zurich and Geneva, began using Miles 10 years ago as it needed one common fleet management platform to be able to run its three branches more efficiently and effectively, rather than rely on several legacy systems it was using.
Philipp Spaniol, IT Director at Auto-Interleasing, said: “We selected Miles for a number of reasons, including its multi-language capability. In Switzerland three main languages are spoken – French, German and Italian. To use a system that could be easily converted from one language to another was extremely important for us.
“The Miles system is easy to use and is highly configurable which allows us to write new configurations without the need to go to a software developer.
“And the system also interfaces with other automotive suppliers, such as fuel card companies, tyre suppliers and service garages very easily, which is another key factor for us. Many systems claim they have this capability, but in our experience, Miles is one of only a few that really does,” he said.
Sofico systems now manage more than 1m vehicles globally for some of the world’s largest leasing companies, and one of the acknowledged benefits of Miles is its development in line with the best practice and ideas that these leasing companies generate.
Gemar Hompes, Managing Director at Sofico, added:”Auto-Interleasing was one of the early adopters of Miles, and we are delighted at the business benefits it has been able to derive from our system as a result of its confidence in Miles. “Auto-Interleasing, as an innovative leasing company, has partnered with Sofico to manage their business through Miles and we have had a very successful working relationship for the last 10 years, to our mutual benefit. Long may it continue.”
