Yummy Rides, the leading third-party rideshare service in Venezuela, delivers an enhanced user experience with Google’s fleet management.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Yummy launched their rideshare service, Yummy Rides, in July 2021, and quickly saw a rise in business. The company saw trips triple from 30,000 to 100,000 in the first two months of business. As Yummy Rides grew in business and Google advanced in fleet management, it was soon recognized that they needed to innovate. The original goal of Yummy’s relationship with Woolpert Digital Innovations was to cut costs and seek expert advice on Google’s mobility solutions.
BENEFITS
“By partnering with Woolpert Digital Innovations, we are able to utilize Google Maps Platform more efficiently and ensure that our drivers know exactly where they are going and how to get there. And it’s a win for our customers who get their rides faster."
WORKING WITH WOOLPERT
With Yummy’s growing market share, Woolpert Digital Innovations provided enterprise pricing, reducing Yummy’s operating costs and saving on Direct Google Maps usage, as well as onboarding the Yummy team into Google’s Private Release On Demand Rides and Delivery API program. This empowered Yummy to embed Navigation SDK, along with other routing APIs, directly into their mobile application to support fleet management. Ignacio Carrillo-Batalla, Chief Technology Officer at Yummy explained, “It took less than a week for our team to implement these new features—my expectation was a lot longer. It was amazing and really saved our team a lot of time to focus on what’s coming next.”
THE SOLUTION
To enhance the end-user experience, Yummy wanted to create a more optimized mobile application. Previously, the Yummy team had to manually paint the navigation line in their back-end to appear in their app during trips. As a consequence, their developers needed to manually change the driver’s route in real time, causing engineering problems with optimization. Woolpert Digital Innovations recommended integrating Navigation SDK to add a turn-by-turn navigation experience directly into the mobile app. This feature also provides real-time navigation with voice guidance and enables the driver to avoid traffic or road hazards. The app also allows riders to book rides using the routing data from nearby drivers and keeps them updated with live progress throughout their trip. Yummy Rides now provides the most optimized route to drivers and allows them to complete pick-ups and drop-offs more quickly.
Yummy also implemented Places API to include place details in a pick-up or delivery status update. This enhances the user experience by giving the driver more detailed information on a pinpoint destination. They also implemented Google’s Dynamic Maps API to add custom branded colors and icons to their map. Creating a custom, detailed map saved their developer resources by storing and managing their geospatial data in the Google Cloud console, letting Google curate, update, and manage boundary data.
Google’s Distance Matrix API allows developers to calculate travel distances and times between multiple origins and destinations. This produces valuable information for route planning and optimization, helping the driver find the most efficient path to take—ultimately saving time and costs.
Using the Autocomplete API, Yummy gives the user real-time suggestions as they type in their destination, improving search efficiency and user experience. Geocoding APIs enable developers to easily convert addresses or place names into precise geographic coordinates, giving the driver a more accurate pinpoint destination for trip completion. Yummy also uses Directions API to integrate accurate and detailed directions into their mobile app for various modes of transportation. This combines providing real-time traffic updates to the driver and more precise travel-time estimates to the rider into one service, saving the driver from having to switch back and forth between Yummy’s app and a routing app.
Yummy worked with Woolpert Digital Innovations to optimize Google Maps Platform for fleet management and is happy with the progress and results it has seen so far. “Since the implementation of this new technology, 52% of our drivers relayed that the new experience was incredible and really comfortable to use,” said Carrillo-Batalla.
