AAM Group has established a new subsidiary company to help businesses combat the current vehicle shortages and find new and better ways to keep mobile through a comprehensive package of solutions.

Mark Thompson, as the new managing director of Onwrd, will be responsible for driving business growth via both new and existing corporate customers

Established in 1997 as Alliance Asset Management, the group is a leading provider of bespoke Mobility as a Service (MaaS), working across car subscription, car clubs, accident management and vehicle rental.

Its services range from AAM Mobility’s holistic tailored mobility solutions, through independent financial solutions provider AAM Leasing, to Alliance Fleetcentre, which provides vehicles and funding solutions to subscription, car club, rental and accident management companies.

The new Onwrd business works across these skills and services, coordinating all the group’s current supplier relationships and services, and bundling them up to provide a comprehensive mobility solution to existing corporate customers and new prospective clients.

This will provide access to multiple mobility channels including vehicle rental, car sharing via car club partnerships, pool fleet solutions, chauffeur drive, private hire cars – and also vehicle subscription via the MyCarDirect subsidiary subscription company.

It launches during a time when the industry is facing “worst-ever” new car supply problems due to a perfect storm of production issues from the pandemic, plus the semiconductor shortage and now a scarcity of other components due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Latest figures from the SMMT show UK car production in Q1 2022 was down some 100,000 units on the same period last year – which itself had been hit by the pandemic.

The BVRLA warned last month that supply shortages are hitting the fleet sector hard, with lead times of up to a year now the norm for all vehicle types as manufacturers prioritise retail channels. And in the last week, the Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP) has said a shortage of daily rental vehicles – cars now as well as vans –  is causing a wide range of problems for businesses and bringing some real headaches for fleet managers.

AAM Group’s new Onwrd division will help the fleet sector address the shortages, finding new ways – or new ways of thinking – to circumvent the issues.

It’s headed up by newly appointed managing director Mark Thompson, who has been with the group for over 12 years as group services director and has a wealth of experience across fleet, rental, breakdown and mobility sectors.

Outlining the company’s proposition, Thompson says: “Onwrd will help customers combat the issues of vehicle shortages by finding more solutions to moving people and goods and keeping them mobile. Supply in more conventional channels such as vehicle rental will continue to be constrained, so we are seeking new ways to address these challenges.”

Speaking to Fleet World, he explains this further, saying: “So, we’ve always been the kind of company whereby we educate, guide, advise and stop people making mistakes about things they don’t realise might cost them money.

“It’s the ‘no known unknowns’ kind of logic and this new business will be a progression of that. We’ll be helping customers with more lateral thinking. For example, by saying, ‘Rather than hiring a car, maybe getting a taxi is a better solution. Because actually, your employees want to get to an airport and they only need to go 20 minutes one way and then 20 minutes coming back.’ So not only can we sort their problem, but actually we might be able to provide them something which is more cost-effective.”

Problem-solving for fleets is nothing new to AAM – it’s part of the group’s DNA and something it excels at, drawing on its variety of solutions.

Thompson explains: “We deal with some major fleets that run a real mix of cars, vans, commercials that kind of thing. We’ve always gravitated – or customers gravitate to us – to situations where fleet requirements or rental requirements typically are a little bit heavy-touch; they have some degree of complexity. It’s always been about businesses that need some help, some advice. The difference with us is that we have access to our own fleet, our own funding and our own rental, whatever it might be.”

The new business draws this all together, providing a ‘one-stop shop’ that makes it easy for customers to access the group’s services and throwing them into relief.

Thompson adds: “There are lots of reasons why we’re doing it. We’re purposely rebranding. With Alliance Asset Management as a group, we’ve done lots of things for years, but when you try and explain it to any one customer, you can end up leaving them confused.

“But with Onwrd, we’re saying, “Here’s part of our business that works with corporates, SMEs, large multinationals, and we’re here to keep your drivers and your goods moving in whatever way we can do.’”

He adds: “Our strength as a business has always been about bringing together lots of different suppliers in all sorts of shapes and sizes in a package solution. The typical customer we talk to doesn’t know that half of the people we work with even exist and it’s about consolidating all of our relationships and presenting those back to our customers in a way which they can access really easily and consistently.”

This includes helping customers with access to electric vehicles in a ‘try-before-you-buy’ kind of way.

Thompson continues: “We’re very early on into the whole switch towards EVs. We’ve always said to customers that it’s an interesting transition. We’ve made it ourselves and we’ve had some problems in our business; we know that it’s an interesting challenge.

“We’re able to provide access, be it from our own fleet or from some of our independent companies, to electric vehicles or hybrids in a much more seamless kind of way. We can help customers try them out, not just purely as a concept but to get some real experience. We’ve actually got many makes and models that customers are ever so likely to want to lease or buy, or whatever, down the road.

“We know there are some real limiting factors around how these vehicles are actually going work for a proportion of the population. But the one thing that we say to customers is that you will never find anyone more able to help you access these cars, to try them, to help you build a flexible fleet around them, than we can.”

And while many in the sector talk about ‘Mobility as a Service’, AAM says its work is about demystifying the buzzwords and finding real solutions to real-life problems.

Thompson explains: “A lot of the challenge to us as a business and us as an industry is that people throw the expression ‘Mobility as a Service’ around like we all expect everyone to know what that means. And there’s two issues. One, it can mean lots of things. And two there are many people for whom the word ‘mobility’ doesn’t mean what we understand it to mean. So we’ve got to do some work and educate customers. Actually, what we say is that it’s an umbrella term for other ways of keeping you going, helping you to get to the right sort of environmental solutions and fleet solutions that you need to get to.”

Thompson also outlines that the company’s background – its in-depth experience of how rental vehicles and lease vehicles are supplied and how commercial vehicles are converted – means that it’s better placed to advise customers on new ways of staying mobile in the current climate.

“I feel like we can talk to our customers, either existing or potential, and advise them from a place of neutrality because we do generally have a bigger, wider picture of what the outlook is. I think the one thing that working for our business of our shape and size brings is that we are very agile. We can make decisions quickly, we can pivot quickly. Customer requirements generally are very unique. We’re much more able to meet them because we can listen and we might just point them down the river in a slightly different vehicle type, make, model, whatever it might be. But we can do that because we’re not constrained by approval levels and sign-offs and committees and all that kind of thing.”

He goes on say: “I think our biggest differentiator is that we do some things ourselves and for other areas, we have partnerships with suppliers. We’re very good at recognising what our own skill set is and we’re very good at managing and working with other suppliers of different services, and putting them all together in a way where the customer gets maximum convenience and minimum fuss. And more than anything else, we are ultimately, really, really flexible. And at this point in time, flexibility is a fantastic attribute because it’s not easy out there.

“We do lots of things for companies that bigger and newer and technology-led companies couldn’t do in a month of Sundays. But we forget how massive a deal it is because we just do it and we then move on to the next challenge.”

The new Onwrd business will provide a means to showcase all of this.

“One of the key things from setting up the new business is that we can sit down with a customer and say, ‘Well, actually we’ve done a really complicated leasing solution for a company that had a particular challenge.’ And it gives us kind of a shop window to talk about all the cool stuff that we can do.

“What we’re really doing is working with our own fleet, our own intellect and someone who’s got the technology side for us and piecing it together. It’s about talking to the customers and asking them what they actually need, as opposed to trying to sell them something that we’ve made,” Thompson finishes.