How Felyx used Locale’s control tower capabilities to expand in high-profit areas
Felyx is an innovative scale-up with ambitious plans for more sustainable and shared urban transport. They are a strong proponent of using shared compact electric vehicles over personal, unused transportation.
It is also one of the fastest-growing micro-mobility players, with over 3 million rides per year and a presence in multiple cities across Europe!
Status Quo
As a growing company with plans to expand into multiple cities, Felyx wanted to address the operational challenges that come with scale. They wanted to unify all operations workflows and be more proactive about their operational decisions on the ground.
Before Locale, the operations team had their hands full dealing with issues like mismatch in supply and demand, rebalancing of vehicles, expanding service areas and so on, which were taking up critical time and resources. Drawing insights from data in unstructured and structured formats from disparate sources involved writing complex SQL queries and multiple stakeholders.
The existing tech stack didn’t allow the team to discern patterns (often undetectable due to siloed tools and massive volume of data) and determine the root cause of problems around utilisation, demand conversion and expansion of service areas. The team was treating ad hoc symptoms and putting out fires as opposed to proactively preventing and resolving underlying issues.
In an industry where it really pays to be proactive and quick, the team was looking for an intuitive interface that allowed them to quickly spot problems in their business and take action on them. A platform that will empower the teams to make real-time autonomous decisions as well as strategies for long term planning.
Introducing Locale, a control tower for Ops teams!
Locale’s control tower capabilities combined with the ability to take quick actions — in a holistic and contextual ecosystem — offered them the one-stop solution to their operational woes. The command centre gives better control of ground operations, enables them to move 10x faster, formulate better strategies, and continuously learn on the go!
“Locale provides the ability to create all the relevant metrics that are required (e.g., app openings, revenue numbers, number of trips, idle time) to be evaluated to effectively optimize service areas. Also, the level of detail of the data (i.e., showing data for hexagons of very small size) makes it very valuable,” says Jesse Borst, Area manager at Felyx.
Felyx’s journey to getting the Locale control tower up and running
So how did we manage to do it? Here’s a peek into how Locale was able to empower the felyx’s Ops team through various use cases:
Service Area optimisation
One main thing that Felyx wanted to do through Locale was to optimise their service areas (areas in which Felyx was operational) by having better visibility of trips.
With the help of Locale, they set up consoles and workflows that enabled them to look at trips at a geo level to optimize for density. That is, if in an area people were taking fewer trips than normal, then the area would be removed from servicing and instead an area with more trips would be added. The main KPI they measured here was the trip density in different areas across different times.
Felyx was successfully able to update its service area boundaries in various areas of Hamburg based on the insights they got from Locale. The team really loved the ease with which they were able to create these metrics, set up the consoles and go granular (i.e to a building level) to get these insights.
Rebalancing and Dynamic Pricing
The next critical use case Locale helped them with was asset utilisation. This is key for businesses as it is tied to matching supply and demand, the core function for any ride sharing business
Currently, rebalancing was not hyperlocal — with the existing setup, there was no quick way to get information about the specific scooters to be moved and to which areas. For example, the on-ground team used to move the mopeds with low usage to the city centre.
After Locale, questions like how do we identify which vehicles to move and where and so on can easily be answered using Locale. They were hence able to monitor and take decisions to:
- Optimize the utilisation of mopeds over time
- Implement dynamic pricing
- Deploy mopeds in areas with high demand
Demand Conversion and tracking the most valuable customers
Understanding latent demand can be game-changing and can improve business KPIs significantly. Felyx uses Locale’s consoles to identify the hotspots and leakages thereby optimising the conversion funnel. They were also able to take a look at the net revenue of the users across different time periods and then identify the start points for them. This helped them make crucial decisions and take actions on:
- Deployment of mopeds
- Providing discounts and incentives
Impact and Results
Felyx saw significant time savings for the company’s workforce after implementing Locale. The teams are no longer required to manually prepare the data, write queries every time they require insight, or conduct an analysis to make a decision. The Ops team alone saved approximately 40 hours per week and Michael Fock, City Manager from Felyx also mentioned that Locale helps in:
- Saving time in extracting relevant data by unifying all the data sources from disparate sources in unstructured and structured formats into an intuitive dashboard .
- Saving time in visualizing by enabling the team to create metrics in a few clicks and instantly visualizing and drilling down to the pattern.
Not only did they save time on analyses performed by the team, but the ease of measuring KPIs like the density of the mopeds in areas, the trip starts from a particular area helped them optimize the service areas. The area and city managers across the company were also able to leverage trips analysis to understand movement trends over time and helped them identify the various hotspots in different parts of the cities.
At the executive level, felyx had the ability to track issues and provided them with visibility into the company’s business health metrics and overall performance, which were used to inform future company-wide strategies and initiatives.
Most importantly, it returned much-needed control to the Ops teams, empowering them to make tactical day-to-day decisions as well as strategic decisions 10x faster!
What Next?
Once a team is able to get the required insights and perform root cause analysis using Locale, the next steps would be to provide alert mechanisms and enable them to take preemptive decisions based on historical trends!
As we all know, the most important part about analysis is what are we doing about it, or the actions that it leads to!
The users on Locale will also be able to:
- Utilize workflows to trigger automated actions/alerts like rebalancing notifications to the on-ground teams.
- Take actions pro-actively based on predictions. For example: Rebalance vehicles with avg. Idle time >30 mins between 6–8 PM and more.
If you are a micro-mobility company with similar problems to solve, contact us to get started with Locale, or follow us on LinkedIn and
Want to take Locale on a test drive? You can reach out to us at aditisinha@locale.ai!
Originally published at https://blog.locale.ai on April 5, 2022.
