Needs

Order Management System

Industry

Ride Sharing

Client

Timeline

Feb 2019 - Jul 2019

ABOUT KATER

Kater is a technology company that creates innovative transport solutions. Their first product is a ride-share service in Vancouver where customers get matched to private-hire drivers on-demand. Unlike Uber and Lyft, Kater was founded in Canada with a fully insured and compliant fleet.

Customers and drivers see a sleek app downloadable on Apple and Android devices. But behind the app serving over five thousand rides a day, Afi Labs technology powers Kater’s business operations.

The complexity of managing Kater’s operations include the fact that Kater owns all their vehicles, does not implement surge pricing which means they need to be highly operationally effective, and drivers are Kater employees with licences and training provided.

Let’s take a dive into the technology to see how an effective dashboard helps Kater manage their fleet and gain invaluable business insights.

OPERATIONAL ISSUES IN THE RIDE-SHARING BUSINESS

Vikram Agarwal manages operations at Kater. His past experience in the taxi cab industry includes working with traditional taxi dispatches typically run by humans. A human dispatcher will see available drivers and guess where passenger demand is going unmatched.

As human dispatchers don’t keep detailed data, there is nothing to back up customer disputes. This leaves customers dissatisfied with the resolution or the business on the losing end. Either way, the traditional taxi dispatch business is disadvantaged.

Now, Kater faces a different type of challenge: simply too much unusable data!

As all the data collected by Kater’s app was only being housed in the cloud, there was no way to visualise relationships between passengers, trip and drivers or attend to customer complaints.

Moreover, the Kater team used to take up to half an hour to dig up information manually with SQL commands.

“We have so much data to work with,” says Vikram. “We needed a simple way to view and make sense of all this data.”

What Kater needed was a layer of reliable technology to power their ride-share dispatch services. This allows Kater the best of both worlds: the traditional reliability of professional taxi or private car drivers with the on-demand modern accessibility of ride-sharing services.

AFI LABS BUILDS KATER OPERATIONS CENTER

Key questions posed to Afi Labs were:
  • Afi Labs

    Creating a way for Kater to understand all their drivers’ locations

  • Afi Labs

    Whether supply of drivers is accurately meeting demands of customers in any area

  • Afi Labs

    Completed trips and other reporting matters

Additionally, the information has to be used for customer excellence such as processing refunds, and combating fraud.

Enter the Kater Operations Center, a real time dashboard that provides insight into Kater’s ride hail operations.

The Operations Center securely connects to transaction data including bookings, payments, pickups, drop offs, and even real-time vehicle locations.

This allows customer support staff to:
  • Afi Labs

    Search and filter bookings by driver or passenger names, IDs, email addresses and phone numbers to quickly find specific booking information, trip details and histories, or retrieve transaction history.

  • Afi Labs

    View a high level summary of each booking including trip start and end times, locations, as well as passenger and driver metadata.

The volume of data generated by Kater’s fleet is displayed in a visually intuitive way, allowing customer support staff to easily manage daily operations. The technology behind Operations Center helps Kater gain actionable insights into their fleet performance, profitability, and quality of service.

Fleet data combined with qualitative comments from Kater employees means specific details and context can be easily accessed. This means Kater’s professionalism and customer experience comes out tops.

“Customer expectations have risen,” Vikram observes. “With app-based ridesharing, customers expect to be matched with a driver in seconds, and this demand for a quality experience is reflected in our on time performance and utilization rate.”

Kater Technologies Inc
Kater Technologies Inc

A BRIDGE BETWEEN THEN AND NOW

“With Ops Center part of Kater’s workflow, We are definitely much more efficient and can spend more time on things that matter,” says Vikram.

Before engaging Afi Labs, Kater was using an off-the-shelf admin dashboard which was hardly customizable.

“It took as much work just to tweak the off-the-shelf dashboard to our needs, compared with having Operations Center built from scratch to our exact business needs and specifications,” says Vikram. In comparison, it only took about three months to build and test the Kater Operation Center fully.

With Vikram’s time in both the traditional taxi industry and now, ride-sharing, he sees Kater as a true bridge between the disrupted and the contemporary.

“Now, we see ourselves as a technology platform provider. What we want to do is offer the Ops Center together with our dispatch algorithm and app to any company that wants to run a ride-share service.”

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