How Ada manages its car fleet with Forest Admin

About Ada

Launched back in 1984, Ada is one of the largest European car rental companies with a very strong presence in France. As part of the efforts to modernize and digitalize their business model in the wake of the tech-infused mobility revolution, they undertook 2 exciting projects. The first being Ada Self-Service and the second being Moov’in.paris.

Ada Self-Service

The process of signing up for a car rental at an agency used to be cumbersome for customers, due to queues at busy moments, paper forms and fixed business hours. To counter this, Ada built an app, Ada Self-Service, which makes it easy to rent, unlock and start a rental car without going to an office.

Ada set out to create a mobile application that would digitally gather the required information (drivers license, insurance…) from future customers. Once these documents have been digitally validated, customers can make car reservations without any hassle. They can go to the local agency close to which the cars are parked, unlock them with their phones at whatever time of day and drive off.

Ada built the platform with the help of BAM, which is one one of the leading French digital development agencies. During the first phase of the project, BAM created a proof of concept for both the mobile application and operational admin panel, in only 4 weeks.

Because operational efficiency, speed of implementation and value added for its client were of key importance, BAM decided to work with Forest Admin for the admin panel side of the equation. After having built the customer-facing product, BAM built a backend admin application in Node.js using Lumber in just minutes. On top of that admin API, Forest Admin provides a top-notch off-the-shelf admin user interface.

Building on this standard interface, specific use-cases were created for the different operational teams at Ada, to handle customer support and most importantly perform user management.

User management

• Description: Ada validates new customers, the submitted documents and deals with the reservations hotline requests through a Forest Admin workflow.
• Technical: Using Summary Views, Smart Segments and the Image Viewer, Ada can monitor if all the necessary details and documents are present and validated. If not the case, Ada can act straight from their admin panel using the Smart Actions to suggest that customers (re)submit certain documents.

Moov’in.paris

In September 2018, a large opportunity arose for Ada when Autolib, the electric station-based cars, owned by JCDecaux, unexpectedly halted its operations. In reaction, Ada decided to launch a second project, called Moov’in.paris, in partnership with Renault. The launch of a fleet of 520 electric cars in the Paris city centre to fill the void left by Autolib. However, contrary to the Autolib model, Ada opted to propose a free-floating service, giving larger flexibility to its customers — be it at larger operational complexity.

Ada operational teams rely on the Forest Admin fleet management panel, as illustrated below, as their core tool.

Fleet management

• Description: Ada track their fleet in a way that makes sense to their operations. Fueling or charging management, dispatching and regular inspections can be all coordinated from our admin panel.
• Technical: Using Smart Segments and Smart Actions it requires very little effort to set-up workflows for your operational teams responsible for the different tasks of maintaining your fleet.

Implementation phase

Forest Admin regularly partners with digital agencies, such as BAM, that frequently need to build operational admin panels for the applications they develop for their clients. And more often than not, they prefer to save time on the design, development and maintenance of the admin panel to shortens the project’s time-to-delivery.

To best help digital agencies like BAM, Forest Admin has set-up a partnership program, in which we provide our partners with both strategic and technical admin support from both our customer success and our solutions engineering team. In the case of Ada’s project, this included a joint kick-off meeting, the design of a plan of attack together, and technical support to the developers through calls and Slack interactions throughout the project.

Conclusion

Forest Admin gave Ada the operational flexibility to implement their user management and fleet management use-cases in a fraction of the time it would have taken them to build this from scratch. Forest Admin increases the agility for the operational teams, and ensures that Ada has access to a great admin panel but with low maintenance requirements.

With 40.000 Moov’in.paris car rentals in just a couple of months, and thousands of people using the Ada Self-Service app, Ada is growing very fast while expanding its offering to other cities.