The regional office managed importer organisations operating under different regulations, customer conditions, market maturity and operating capability.

A single central plan would have been too rigid. Unbounded local freedom would have made performance difficult to compare and regional priorities difficult to manage.

The work therefore separated what needed to remain common from what importers could adapt locally.

The first phase reviewed importer operations and the regional strategy together rather than assuming that weak performance meant weak local execution.

The assessment covered areas including supply chain, dealer engagement, fleet activity, local marketing and responsiveness to market changes.

That created a more useful starting point: some gaps required regional direction, some required importer capability, and some were simply different local operating conditions.

A Balanced Scorecard was developed for the regional office and linked to importer activity. A Management by Objectives structure then translated the regional priorities into objectives that could be adapted to local conditions.

The intention was not to make every market operate identically. It was to keep a common performance language while allowing the route to the result to differ.

Local teams can have genuine commercial authority only if the wider organisation can still see performance, compare markets and identify when an exception is becoming a structural problem.

Regional managers were coached on importer relationships and the programme used workshops and recurring communication sessions to exchange operating experience across markets.

Those routines allowed local exceptions and market changes to come back into the regional system rather than sitting outside it as one-off workarounds.

Without that feedback loop, a scorecard can create reporting consistency while the operating model continues to fragment underneath it.

The source case records significant variation across importer markets, including regulatory complexity, supply conditions, EV demand and price sensitivity.

The design therefore allowed local adaptation in areas such as marketing, fleet management and inventory while retaining alignment to regional objectives.

The useful governance boundary was whether the regional office had defined the outcome, evidence and escalation logic clearly enough for a local decision to remain comparable.

• An operating assessment across the regional office and importer network.
• A regional Balanced Scorecard linked to importer activity.
• A Management by Objectives structure that allowed local adaptation inside common regional goals.
• Importer and regional-manager workshops for knowledge transfer and feedback.
• Recurring review routines intended to keep local adaptations connected to regional strategy.

Regional autonomy is useful when the market really is different. It becomes fragmentation when every market uses a different definition of performance, a different escalation path and a different interpretation of the regional strategy.

Keep the data, performance logic, standards and decision boundaries common enough for the organisation to learn across markets, then give local teams real authority inside that system.