How to cut costs and drive ecologically at the same time?

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How to cut costs and drive ecologically at the same time?

O2 is a leading digital communications company with more than 2 million customers in the Slovakian market. They contacted us to develop a solution that would help their employees use fewer cars on business trips. The goal was to travel more ecologically and use company’s resources more effectively. With this goal in mind, we set up the first meeting to get a better understanding of the requirements and discuss visions and first ideas.


“They developed a flawless system that saved lots of resources and decreased our CO2 emissions by 65%. Our employees find it easy to use and enjoy traveling with their colleagues.”

O2 ABOUT DOBRÁ JAZDA SOLUTION BY REVOLWARE.


Project goal:

Use fewer cars on business trips to decrease CO2 emissions and save the company’s resources.

Technologies:

Solution

An internal ride-sharing system, powered by a highly responsive, mobile-friendly website.

Phase 1: Meetings, research, planning

When 4 employees with 4 different cars regularly travel on business trips to the same location, you either have a problem or a big budget. In this case, O2 decided to spend these resources elsewhere and created the 1st version of DobraJazda. The first solution that O2 developed was an excel table where employees signed up for different rides in a given timeframe, but this solution was exhausting company’s capacities by creating additional workload for managers and other departments. O2, therefore, created a team that would find a better solution. They came up with the idea to develop a website and an app to increase the usability of the solution and ease up on the bureaucratic work.

After hearing O2’s propositions we set up a short set of questions to understand how their employees approach apps and website usage. We found out that employees who take part in business trips usually have unlimited mobile data packages, provided by O2. This left us with 2 important insights:

  • Employees who take part in business trips have unlimited mobile data packages.
  • Some employees need to be able to access the system from their phones, while others would prefer to use a computer instead.

From these insights, we concluded that a website and an app (that would sync the data for offline usage) is overkill as the app would not provide additional value to our customer. We presented these findings to O2 and agreed on building a highly responsive mobile-friendly website.

As soon as we agreed on the course of action, we thoroughly discussed all details with O2’s team and signed functional specification. The functional specification was composed of all the functions and operations that the website needed to provide the user with and the price for the solution.

Phase 2: Problem Solving and Design

Definition of the problem

Develop a system that manages rides and their additional information. Specifically:

  • Starting and ending location of the drive
  • Departure time
  • Option to return from the ending location to the starting location with the same drive or by picking other means of transport
  • The number of passengers on each drive shown in real-time

Problem Solution and Algorithm:

Travel (this unit is responsible for all the data about selected drive)

  • Trip (Who registered for the business trip, who created it, info about the users involved and departure time)
  • Starting and ending location
  • Type of transport (DobráJazda drive or other means of transport)
  • Number of occupied seats

Travel unit of the database operates and collects data from other data sets to compose the following algorithm:

  1. The driver creates a new Drive (stating starting and ending point, departure time, driver info).
  2. The user signs up for a business trip.
  3. Now the user is offered an option to either join a drive or use other means of transport.
  4. If the user chooses other means of transport, this info is written into Type of transport unit.
  5. If the user chooses to participate as a passenger in a created Drive, user’s info is written into Trip unit and the number of seats is recalculated.

Design

If the user chooses to participate as a passenger in a created Drive, user’s info is written into Trip unit and the number of seats is recalculated.

Phase 3: Testing

Functionality, Performance, Integration, and Database tests:

In house test cases performed by our developers and testers.

User Interface and Usability tests:

In this case, we first used an online focus group to make sure there are no spelling errors or inconsistencies and that all the buttons work as they should. Based on these findings we improved the website and gathered 2 target users (O2 employees) for the usability test. We took notes on how they interact with the webpage, how they feel about the design, and their conclusions about the signup process for the drives.

Security tests:

Stress tests, Brute force attack test cases, SQL injection attack test cases, and more.

Phase 4: Summary

To sum it up, these are the critical metrics that outline our development process and workflow on the O2 DobraJazda project.

20
Number of meetings

18 397
Lines of code written

The number of hours spent developing the solution:

PhaseHours
Planning and Research8
Design and Development209
Testing43
Total259

Results

O2 previously used a shared excel file, to list and offer possible transport options for business trips. After the implementation of dobrajazda.sk, CO2 emissions dropped by 1369 kilograms per month and employees started to travel more efficiently, reducing the number of cars used per business trip. An unexpected outcome was an increase in productivity. Before most of the employees drove their vehicles, whereas now 1 of them is driving and the rest can work during the travel. You can see how the metrics compare in the table below.

Before After
CO2 emissions per year22.67.53
Average of rented cars per month145
Average of people traveling in one car on a business trip13
Money saved on labor and overhead costs28 800€

Ready to make your logistics greener?

Contact us at: info@revolware.com