As of the first quarter of 2023, the integration of the industrial vehicle networks operated by GROUPAUTO Unión Ibérica in Spain and Portugal became effective. Since the beginning of this year, the network has begun to operate within the same shared environment. From an operational point of view, this was a logical move: the Spanish-Portuguese border is a very common crossing for customers from both countries, so garages that serve fleets and self-employed clients on both sides would have facilities to work together. Work on the integration project was ongoing for a few months, which saw the modification of necessary elements of GNM software.
At the end of last year, the meeting between the GAUIb plant and all the involved Partners was held in Porto to close the integration agreement. This agreement has allowed the unification of several services (training, CRM in technical assistance, payment guarantees, and the notification system), which achieved the objective of standardizing the type of training that is given to the garages, balanced the workload of the technical assistance, and saw more than 180 garages share the procedure to generate payment guarantees within the same network environment.
Through this new format, any garage in Spain or Portugal registered on the GNM platform is allowed to request assistance services at any other network point directly, validating the payment guarantee through automatic notifications by email and SMS. Through this process, without added cost for the garage requesting or the repairer, a guarantee of up to €3,000 is obtained from GAUIb, enough to repair most issues. Also, when assistance is needed outside normal opening hours, or occurs in a territory other than the Iberian Peninsula, the 24-hour assistance call-centre service has also been coordinated in the integration.
This service works now with the same rules for both countries and from a unified list of garages, authorized by password to request services anywhere in Europe.
The advantages of this integration are already evident: in addition to improving the quality of training and creating a calendar that facilitates attendance at garages, increasing the number of courses available and adding new locations, there has also been an increase of 70% in the number of interventions crossed between garages in the network.
