Harmonizing Car Policy Across 23 Markets in EMEA

The Situation

The client, a global company in the consumer goods and personal care industries, operates a fleet of nearly 800 vehicles across 23 countries in EMEA, combining job-need cars and benefit cars for employees. Each country maintained its own car policy, and many of these had not been updated in years. An EMEA-wide car policy had been introduced in 2020, but it had never been actively used or communicated, leaving local practice as the de facto standard across the region.

Fleet governance was split across several stakeholders. Local HR Business Partners owned individual country policies, the EMEA Total Rewards team was responsible for car allowance and leasing budgets linked to employee job role and grade, and the Global Business Services (GBS) Team owned the overall fleet process and supplier management – with day-to-day service delivery run in close cooperation with an outsourced HR operations vendor.

The client's guiding philosophy was to provide cars only where required for the role, or where market practice justified a benefit car, benchmarked at market median rather than best-in-class. With a single-source leasing partnership being phased in over four years, and no consistent way to compare local policies against market practice or sustainability ambitions, the organization needed an independent, structured assessment to bring its car policy landscape in line with its own philosophy and its sustainability goals.

Key Challenges

1. Fragmented, outdated local car policies across 23 countries
2. An EMEA-wide policy that existed on paper but was never adopted
3. Fleet governance split across HR, Rewards, GBS and an outsourced vendor
4. No consistent benchmark against market-median practice per country
5. Limited integration of sustainability and electrification into local policies

Business Impact

The assessment gave EMEA leadership, HR and Rewards teams a clear, evidence-based view of where local car policies stood against both market practice and the organization's own philosophy. By bringing a fragmented set of local car policies together into one recommended regional framework – with room for local nuance – the client gained a foundation to harmonize fleet governance, embed sustainability into every market, and manage fleet costs while remaining market competitive.