One of the main areas, in which AGE can bring added value to all its members is in the relationship with our suppliers.
As a group, we are responsible for more than 1.5 million annual services, which is a very big number for our business. This means that when a supplier is speaking with AGE as a group, they have a completely different perspective from when speaking with our members individually, which also allows us to guarantee the best conditions for our members.
The quality and standardization of the products we use daily are critical for the success of our business and group, and of great importance to our main customers, such as insurance companies, leasing, and fleet managers.
In our early years, our customers challenged us to guarantee the safety of our service through adhesives, due to their importance in auto glass replacement. We presented our project to Dupont (Dow, at that time) and the interest was immediate, leading to them becoming the first official AGE supplier. Until today we work together and we already count 15 more partner suppliers in our global portfolio.
2. What are the selection criteria for new AGE partner suppliers, according to its new strategy?
The 1st criteria is quality and safety. In every one of our portfolio segments – glass, tools, trims, adhesive, uniforms, equipment, etc., we need to guarantee that we only work with high-quality suppliers and products.
The 2nd criteria is innovation. We are working in a very competitive and challenging business and we need to set the trend. We need to be the first to adopt new products and solutions, guiding our members towards the future. We are doing that with AI solutions, ADAS equipment, and repair tools, but also with glass, our main product, through relationships with the industry leaders who are now adding technological features to windscreens.
Lastly, support. From our partner suppliers, we need to have a very professional team that can support our market needs, everywhere across Europe and globally, giving us the tools to develop the brand locally, with marketing actions, local training, and fast support when something doesn’t go according to plan.
3. All AGE members are independent organizations, which means that they make their own decisions locally.
What is AGE’s main difficulty in generating win-win agreements with its partner suppliers and how is AGE working to surpass these issues?
This is for sure the biggest challenge we have on our hands. When we look at our members, we have very different pictures: from large-sized companies to small-sized markets, from members with centralized distribution to members that buy directly from suppliers, from high digitalization standards to 1st digital steps, this means that the needs of one member are not necessarily the needs of the other.
Giving access to better commercial conditions, by leveraging our scale, is what we know every member desires, and this is where we have started. Now we need to continue our journey, and to do that, we will move forward with increased digital integration and information, between our members, and our suppliers.
4.What can members and customers expect from future partnerships with suppliers?
Our partnerships are not here for the short term. So, our members and customers can expect that we will continue to push our current suppliers to closer partnerships with a higher level of integration and increased benefits. But this also means that we will meet our supplier’s needs by bringing every member on board so that we have a win-win partnership.
We will also continue searching for new suppliers that are innovative and important for our needs and our strategy. Now we are adding suppliers that can support us in our sustainability journey, and in the short term, all our suppliers must comply with sustainability.
5. How can AI support AGE’ sustainability commitment to become climate neutral until 2025?
Artificial Intelligence is certainly a topical subject now, and we are seeing a significant number of new technology entrants using AI and computer vision to recognize vehicle damage and then automatically kick off a resultant downstream process. Backed by big data sets and machine learning algorithms, this technology has a strong potential to automate many of the current manual insurance processes and drive sustainability. An example of where embracing this technology is also good for the environment is to allow the AI to determine a glass replacement or repair. Worldwide, glass manufacturing processes produce at least 86 a million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year. Repairing vs replacing can help make a dent here with the average carbon footprint from replacing a windscreen estimated to be 44kg CO2 emissions, including production, transport, and recycling! Using an AI tool, whose link can be sent to the policyholder, would allow an upfront repair vs replace decision to be made, increasing the number of repairs.
6. Customer experience is one of AGE main focuses. How is AGE working to achieve high results with a digital approach?
In my experience, customers, and this includes not only our business-to-business partner but, also their customers, increasingly want on-demand convenience. This convenience facilitated by digitization is a mega trend and businesses that do not follow adequately are at risk. Whether it is ordering taxi or a quick take way, booking a flight, or even finding a date, people increasingly just want to press a button on their phone! While servicing the glass needs of our customer may not be as exciting as finding at date, the underlying need for the experience to be quick, convenient, and easily accessible is common. A key objective of AGE is to help our members facilitate a transition to an increasingly digital world. The includes sharing both best practice and best platforms, many of which are being developed by our members proprietarily. So, with the idea that our members do not necessarily need to re-invent the wheel, we certainly encourage them to look within the AGE community to see what can be shared. This can result in saved capital expenditure and faster time to implementation.
About Joana Marques
Joana Marques graduated in Economics from the University of Porto in Portugal 2003. In the same year she started her career as a product manager at Optimus, a telecommunications company in Portugal. Five years later she accepted a new challenge in ExpressGlass, as a purchasing manager.
In 2009, she supported the launch of the ExpressGlass operation overseas in São Paulo, Brazil. After this project, she becomes the aftermarket marketing manager at Nors Group, owner of ExpressGlass in Portugal. In 2012, Joana became ExpressGlass CEO, the role that she currently holds.
From 2017 to 2022, she and Inter-Risco Private Equity were the shareholders of ExpressGlass, which recently was acquired by Cary Group.
AGE appointed Joana Marques as its board member in 2017, where currently she is the “oldest” Board member on the panel.
At AGE, Joana is mainly responsible for commercial agreements as well as expanding and improving the quality of AGE members’ services.
Input your search keywords and press Enter.
