Propelling Sustainable Means of Mobility in the East African Market
The Electric Vehicle (EV) mobility landscape brought about major disruptions in the transportation sector by providing cleaner and greener alternatives with a significantly lower carbon impact. Pixii, while acknowledging the impact of EVs, decided to unlock new levels of sustainability within the EV sector itself by introducing a fast, reliable, and efficient battery-swapping system.
Targeting the East African market, the client aimed to redefine and revolutionize the way large commercial fleets operated. Instead of relying on traditional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles, the client envisioned a strategic transition to a more sustainable electric vehicle fleet, backed by a solid battery-swapping infrastructure.
The new infrastructure possesses immense potential to curb the carbon footprint while sustaining cost-effectiveness in the large-scale adoption of EVs.
To launch a battery-swapping management system, the client had to navigate through a series of complex challenges.
Despite being faster than EV charging, the client required the battery swapping system to be swift and efficient to compete against the traditional refueling stations.
Service lags occur due to slow battery swapping speed, resulting in heavy EV footfalls at the swapping stations, making the two directly relational.
Battery allocation, invoicing, and tracking returned batteries required a precise and robust battery tracking function. This was to be done with the help of Battery IDs.
Manually updating the battery ID and client information left the system vulnerable to human error and was also a time-consuming process.
The EV batteries can be swapped at any station. This required a synchronized database inclusive of swapping history, battery ID, driver ID, and inventory details.
The client invoiced customers for the charge percentage between drained and fully charged batteries. The integration of battery IDs further complicated invoicing.
With B2B-focused operations, the client required a monthly consolidated billing system for invoicing corporate clients and their large commercial fleets.
The client's target market majorly carried out payments via offline methods but for maintaining cash flow, smooth online payments were equally important.
The core creative concept of the client, i.e., swapping drained batteries with fully charged ones part-aligned with Yo!Rent's key value proposition of rental. Its overall architecture also provided baseline support for battery-swapping operations. However, to provide complete support, we carried out some necessary customizations with great emphasis on granular details to overcome the aforementioned challenges and reach the preferred outcome.
To align Yo!Rent with the client's proposed battery-swapping management system, we optimized and introduced user-friendly workflows.
We added the Battery ID tracking functionality with the QR code scanning system for quick, accurate and automated data entry.
To increase the overall EV adoption rate in the client's target market, we integrated EV rental and sales functionalities into the management system.
To facilitate online payments, we integrated the East African market's most recognized payment gateway.
For quick and hassle-free on-the-go payments, we added a distinctive invoicing module with advanced algorithms to charge as per the battery percentage.
For B2B operations, we added a consolidated invoicing system that generates and sends monthly invoices directly to corporate partners.
Corporate partners get a dedicated interface to access their commercial fleet's comprehensive details, including swapping history and assigned delivery partner.
Every delivery partner can also access their swapping history from the newly developed sub-corporate user interface.
We revamped various design elements, including content blocks, landing pages, the checkout process, and other layouts to align with the client's business requirements.
The client ensures optimal utilization of resources with sustainable results by centralizing the charging grids to a common warehouse. From the warehouse, fully charged batteries are transported to different swapping stations. Both corporate fleets and direct consumers can visit the swapping stations to exchange drained batteries with charged ones. While consolidated invoicing is implemented for corporate fleets, direct consumers can complete the payment in real-time. At the end of the day, drained batteries are collected and transported back to the warehouse for charging.
In our exclusive build for the Pixii, the required business configurations were met with a convergence of existing and custom-developed features.
