To us, Operational Excellence is executing the business strategy more consistently and reliably than the competition, with lower operational risk, lower operating costs and increased revenues relative to the competitor.
It does therefore play a role in different business areas: From general operations to cost management, user experience, the user journey and communication.
Are you interested in how Operational Excellence is understood and lived elsewhere? As part of the MOQO Summit 2021, we surveyed speakers and workshop leaders about Operational Excellence in their companies. You can find the results here.
We want to achieve profitability and sustainable growth. This includes three important factors. First, the pricing has to be acceptable for the customer and the cost needs to be below the price. Second, our service is attractive so that the churn is low and we have more customers signing up. Third, utilization and contribution margin (per car, model, station and fleet level) are high enough to sustain income and profitability but low enough so that customers can find a car when needed.
In regards to our team structure, we have a management team consisting of our Chief Executive Officer, a Financial Officer, an Operational Manager and a Marketing and Communications Manager. The Operational Manager is responsible for all operating processes. His team includes administrative as well as field workers.
To reach process optimization especially in our operations, we adopt a Lean Philosophy and focus on automatization. We work with the PDCA-Cycle and use Business Intelligence to make sure we have the needed statistics to base our decisions on.
Pivotal for our monitoring are our Management Team meetings on a weekly basis. There, we review our KPIs and depending on these we make decisions and plan the upcoming steps or changes.
The KPIs we look at are the following:
In order to evaluate the success or failure of a company over time, the regular measurement of sensibly selected key figures (indicators) can be helpful.
These then help to identify the need for action, to act accordingly and to assess the effect of measures taken in retrospect.
We regularly conduct surveys, work with focus groups and use general feedback that we receive through our user forum, the customer service, Social Media and the app stores. Also, our other KPIs allow us some behavioral observations to rate the overall satisfaction.
There are mainly three areas where we can still further improve our processes. One is Operations, especially in regards to fleet management, the topic of winter and summer tires and integration of a Power Business Intelligence tool for better monitoring of our KPIs. Another area is Accounting, there we need to improve our processes for fee handling and implement more automatization. In Marketing we need to focus more on conversion tracking. We should implement a better monitoring process in relation to signups, marketing campaigns etc.
The pursuit of Operational Excellence should orbit around the following factors:
Yes, we want to highlight the importance of Corporate Social Responsibility. In this day and age, this factor cannot be overlooked and the environmental effect is one of the core components making carsharing an attractive and future-proof mobility solution. When you as a sharing provider continuously improve your processes to offer a better service, you are not only striving for your own success but also for a more sustainable mobility future.
Bilkollektivet has stated as its purpose in its Articles of Association that “Bilkollektivet shall offer smart, environmentally friendly, and nonprofit sharing of vehicles that fully replaces the user’s need for owning a private car. Bilkollektivet shall by this contribute to a greener and better environment with fewer cars and less unnecessary driving”. Scientific research (TØI) has estimated that one shared station-based car replaces approximately 10 privately owned cars. This reduction in environmental footprint has a measurable effect and is one of the key factors valued by both users and regulatory institutions.
Bilkollektivet was founded 25 years ago in Oslo and is now Norway's largest car-sharing provider. For about three years, Bilkollektivet has been the only Norwegian provider to operate profitably. Another distinctive aspect is that the organization is based on a cooperative ideal. Members become shareholders themselves when they join the cooperative, pay a monthly fee and, in addition, only the fees per booked trip. Fuel or loads and tolls are included. All profits are used to expand the vehicle fleet or to offer members even more benefits. As a non-profit car sharing service, Bilkollektivet strives to contribute to shaping the sustainable future of mobility and to provide a real alternative to owning a car.
