Athlon Car Lease has implemented Sofico’s Miles software system in two countries – Spain and Italy – ahead of a wider European roll-out during the next two years.

Athlon, with a fleet in excess of 120,000 vehicles, also operates in nine other European markets and manages a total of more than 234.000 vehicles across Europe, with plans to expand into new markets in the coming years.

The company has now implemented the Miles automotive leasing and fleet management software system in Spain and Italy to manage its fleet operations in both countries, as it runs similar sized businesses of around 6-7,000 vehicles with some 45 employees in each.

Athlon then plans to use the experience gained from these two implementations to introduce the Miles system into Germany, where it operates a fleet of around 28,000 vehicles, by the end of 2013. This will be followed by a wider roll-out across its fleets in the other countries.

So far the process has gone smoothly and the company was able to implement Miles in only seven months in Spain and just five in Italy.

Tijmen Mekel, (pictured) senior vice president of information technology at Athlon Car Lease, said “Our strategy is to give all our users the same customer experience in every country. This means standardizing our systems to replicate the same processes in every country we operate in.

“We currently have a number of legacy systems in place in our portfolio and we want to replace them and standardize our processes wherever possible to create efficiencies across the business. Miles is the ideal system to allow us to do this,” he said.

“We were able to implement Miles very quickly in both Spain and Italy thanks to the Reference Implementation setup which removed the need for long preliminary discussions around set up and implementation.

“We also ran joint workshops in both Barcelona and Rome for staff from both countries so that they had a thorough understanding of the system and we could further speed up the implementation process,” he said.

Mekel said that the lessons learned would prove invaluable for future implementations.

“We will take what we have learnt from both implementations and use that knowledge to help implement the system in Germany in 2013. The German market is a little more sophisticated and we will have to pay more attention to workflow, customer reporting and specific local interfaces which will take more time than the other two countries,” he said.