About Friesland Lease
Founded in 1973, Friesland Lease is a leasing company based in the northern Netherlands, providing business and private customers with sustainable mobility solutions, from electric cars to lease bicycles. The company positions itself as a leading mobility innovator in the region and holds ISO 9001:2015 certification.
The challenge: Manual work that couldn't scale
Every car Friesland Lease leases out required a manual check of which discount applied: central purchasing discounts, promotional discounts for yellow-plate commercial vehicles, and trim-specific discounts, spread across lists that changed by brand and type. With roughly 2,900 cars in the catalog, plus complexity from HEV/PHEV variants and brand-specific rules, the process ate up time, was error-prone, and did not scale with a growing fleet.
A company-wide AI brainstorm session earlier in 2025 had already shown where the biggest AI opportunities sat within Friesland Lease. Building on that exploration, the organization wanted to turn one concrete process into something that genuinely worked, rather than leaving it as an idea. Friesland Lease looked for a partner able to move quickly from a working prototype to a tool its team could use daily.
The solution: From prototype to production
DataNorth AI was asked to turn one concrete AI opportunity at Friesland Lease, surfaced during an earlier brainstorm session, into a working product. Working closely with Ruben Regnerus, product owner at Friesland Lease, a first prototype grew into a full MVP web application.
The approach consisted of:
- Building in iterations: Starting from a 40-hour prototype, new matching rules were demonstrated and adjusted based on feedback every week.
- Smart matching logic: The application recognizes brand, type, and trim, including HEV/PHEV variants and yellow and grey license-plate categories, assigning every match a confidence score, built by consultant Harm-Jan Rozema and engineer Marco Breemhaar.
- People stay in control: Low-confidence matches go to a verification screen, so the team checks exceptions itself before a discount rule is applied.
The results: impact in figures
When the MVP was delivered at the end of April 2026, the project showed the following impact:
Impact
- Automates discount matching for 2,900 cars in the fleet database.
- From prototype to operational MVP web app in just over ten weeks.
- Scalable, Azure cloud-hosted solution, ready for new brands and discount rules.
- Complex exceptions such as HEV/PHEV variants and license-plate category rules are automatically flagged for review, rather than overlooked.
2900+
10
Conclusion
After a company-wide AI brainstorm session, Friesland Lease picked discount-list matching for its vehicle fleet as its first concrete AI project, built from prototype to working web app. The collaboration with DataNorth AI proves that broad AI exploration pays off when followed by a focused push on one measurable process.
