Effective Supply Redistribution: Life-and-Death role in Bike Renting

Effective supply redistribution has the potential to reduce the inventory carrying cost, minimize shortage and improve customer service. In fact, to extract the best from effective supply redistribution, synchronization of data gathered from multiple locations is the real task. Manufacturers and service providers directly deal with customers, most of them use distribution channels to make product or service available to the customer. When you are in vehicle renting business, distribution becomes redistribution. The similar issue is faced by bike sharing enterprises such as YoBike, LimeBike, and BleeperBike. Such enterprises make commuting around the town easy using public parking stands as bike docks.

Effective supply redistribution can be a citable source of competitive advantage for vehicle renting enterprises. Analyzing data, mitigating risk, optimizing cost and improving productivity are key points to improve company’s efficiency effectively. Companies can create a ripple effect for organization advantage by strategically improving any one area of supply chain. This can be done in order to shorten the processing time for making the bike ready for use of customer, enhancing delivery time and to manage the inventory in a better way.

How to make bikes available at all locations?

Distribution channels vary for each business, so does redistribution. For vehicle renting platform, making or choosing the effective supply redistribution channel can be done by analyzing the customer behavior. Channel consists of different independent business operations which need to be aligned to create demand and fulfilling customer’s need. Redistribution channels can be configured together by bringing all the business stakeholders in unison.

The issue is to make the bikes available at all locations depending upon the demand. It is very common in every business and majorly in vehicle renting business that demand at some locations is more in comparison. To cater to high demand and to retain the customer, the supply must sync with the demand. Currently, the bike renting enterprises pick up the bikes from one location and park it at the different location, making bikes available at every location. It is time-consuming and attracts a lot of human errors. Analyzing the past data of the number of booking from each location to different locations and forecasting the demand on basis of day of the week and hour of the day, gives better insights to cater the demand at every location.

Dock-optimization

Real-time tracking of each bike through admin dashboard gives insights to admin to transport the bikes from one location to another at the particular time. Attracting fine to the customer if the bike is not parked at the desired location makes the customer park at the exact destination showed on the map interface of the customer’s mobile app. Bike rental enterprises must use the location tracking technology that allows to lock and unlock the bike only from the marked location.

Enabling dock-optimization technology will automatically create a task for the company to optimize the number of bikes at each dock. The request will be sent to the company’s agent with a task to transfer “X” number of bikes from one dock to another dock. In addition to this, the priority of the task can be set as per the customer demand, so that no customer will be lost.

Furthermore, in future, the bike renting companies can add a new feature that suggests customer park the bike at the destination within “Y” miles to the desired destination. This can be enabled with the geo-fencing technology, allowing admin to mark the area on map interface or by defining the radius. Enterprises can offer the discount to the customer in such cases, reducing the bikes transfer agent efforts and transferring cost of bikes. It can be a win-win situation for both the company and customer, creating financial leverage for both customer and enterprise.

Future Potential

Bike renting platforms are like an independent thing with phenomenal growth. In fact, the industry is still in its growth stage and lot of innovations are expected before it reaches the maturity stage. Tweaking of user experience is the need to create the seamless operation. Fixing bikes and docking stations are hard for bike rental enterprises and enterprises are now shifting to use of public parking space to make new docking station. Using public parking spaces will increase the visibility and more new customer will engage. Bringing convenient, affordable and low carbon mode of transportation for short distance and making the commute eco-friendly is expected to see a high rise in creating more customer demand than ever before. For bike rental enterprises, many new markets are still untapped and famous brands like YoBikes, BleeperBikes and LimeBikes can enjoy early bird benefit in many untapped markets.