22 ABLA The Brazilian Association of Automobile Rental and Leasing Companies (ABLA) has set its course for the coming years. The way forward was drawn up following hard work at the VIII National Convention in 2014 for board members and national directors which resulted in demands and solutions required to improve services for members. At the VIII National Convention, ABLA organized debates among its managers to understand what its main fields of action are. This produced ten cuttingedge projects to be rolled out by 2017. Lodi, a consultancy, compiled these demands. “Without ranking importance, projects were drawn up to boost communications between ABLA and its members and the market, to improve event management, training of members, to develop the regional board and young people, to expand commercial partnerships, to develop new products, to improve ABLA’s processes, to review its articles of association and policy coordination,” says Cecilia Lodi, director of the company. With the setting and rolling out of these strategies, ABLA has taken a significant step towards improvement of communications and consequently of corporate relationships with the members themselves. At the same time, ABLA also seeks to gain even more importance and strength with business partners, with public authorities and also society as a whole. “The ten projects set out short and medium term action to meet the needs of ABLA members. This is the role that an association must have, that is - to constantly build closer relationships with its main client,” says Lodi. When specifying the institutional benefits, the consultant says that members will get more services and better quality from a body elected and subsidized by them, which will seek to honor this responsibility on a daily basis. Further information on the projects is to be found in the box below. Planned future ABLA’s Management Board sets targets for the coming years. Strategies that will build stronger ties with members and society will be ruled out by 2017 The route to be followed Improved communications and management have been included in the plan. The details are provided by consultancy, Lodi The internal communications project will implement actions to improve the relationships between ABLA and its members, promoting union and the alignment of interests in the segment. At the same time, external communications with the market will boost the perception of the segment and of ABLA’s value as defender of the interests of this important sector of Brazil’s economy. As regards the improvement of event management, ABLA will raise its profile through periodic or one-off events to discuss and develop thinking and guidelines for this business. • On the training project of members, it was understood that entity’s support was needed in the training and retraining of staff, owners and the new generation of members. This is a project will create and deliver training courses and develop partnerships with educational institutions to fully meet the demands that have arisen. • The board development project started well before completion of the organizational work on the other projects, through the building of relationships between Regional Directors and the Management Boardl. In 2014 two spaces were created at Board meetings for regional directors to take part and get informed about the action taken and the dynamics of the meetings themselves. The project goes much further, with the Board wanting to create the conditions for the Regional Directors to be multipliers of ideas, a communications channel for the issues that affect members regionally. Also, ABLA Youth was created for this project, preparing the new generation of members for a more complex and dynamic world. • The project to expand commercial partnerships will study, select and further develop the deals offered to members, which are essential to the profitability of the business. • The new product development project will focus on research, studies and debates aimed at creating and selecting new management tools to be used internally and by the market, focused on members’ profitability. • The eighth project, policy articulation, was based on the principle that external relationships are a key pillar for ABLA. Developing close communications with these partners helps reduce risk in the segment. • The formalization of internal processes is another step on one taken two years ago with the restructuring of ABLA. Now it will focus on fine-tuning and refining its processes in order to make it faster to act and to sustain the actions and plans in the other projects. • The last of the projects is a review of ABLA’s articles of association. Studies will be undertaken to modernize the Code of Ethics and to create a compliance process at ABLA to serve members’ demands and to create an ABLA that is increasingly active and effective in its representation and defense of rights.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDU0Njk=