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Provectus > Case Studies > Micromobility Platform Modernization: Swiftmile's Journey to Business Growth and Operational Efficiency
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Micromobility Platform Modernization: Swiftmile's Journey to Business Growth and Operational Efficiency

Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Cement
  • Construction & Infrastructure
Applicable Functions
  • Maintenance
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Construction Management
  • Vehicle-to-Infrastructure
Services
  • Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
  • System Integration
The Challenge

Swiftmile, a universal charging platform for micromobility, was preparing for its next phase of global expansion. However, the company's growth potential was limited by its existing platform's monolithic infrastructure and backend logic. The platform could not support more than 600 stations while handling about 30 messages per second, causing substantial time losses when processing transactions beyond this limit. This major bottleneck limited the platform’s performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency. Swiftmile needed a robust, highly scalable, cloud-based platform that could maximize scaling potential, simplify the integration of new communication streams, and prepare for worldwide expansion while keeping down infrastructure costs. Additionally, Swiftmile sought to make their platform data-driven, with the ability to collect, process, and analyze streaming data in real time to improve user experience and explore data business opportunities.

About The Customer

Swiftmile is a universal charging platform for micromobility, designed to make sustainable transport available to everyone. The company provides a one-stop charging and parking solution for e-bikes, e-scooters, and e-mopeds through a network of Charging Hubs. Swiftmile is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with deployments across Europe and North America. As part of its business turnaround strategy, Swiftmile was preparing for its next phase of global expansion. The company was evaluating new market opportunities and testing different business models in the dynamic market environment.

The Solution

Provectus, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, reviewed Swiftmile's platform and proposed a solution to build a new microservice-based data platform on AWS. The platform was developed using a combination of AWS services, Apache Kafka, Java stack, and Swiss Army Kube (SAK). The solution involved reducing the number of transactions and database operations in the message processing pipelines, transforming the backend logic and infrastructure for data streaming tasks, preparing the infrastructure to integrate advanced solutions for handling autoscaling and geoscaling components of the platform, and improving fault tolerance of the platform. The new platform was designed and built as a microservice-enabled, cloud-based application with advanced data streaming capabilities. The platform and its new features were deployed, migrated, and implemented on production servers.

Operational Impact

  • The modernized micromobility management platform enabled Swiftmile to initiate and realize a business turnaround strategy. The new platform added scalability to ensure faster, more efficient growth; optimized operational costs (for both development and business teams); and improved customer experience through rapid access to data and its business-critical insights. The platform's performance and capacity increased by 20x, with the same cloud infrastructure costs. It enabled Swiftmile to quickly scale business use cases and models, and add new functionality, data sources and pipelines, without the need to change the overall structure of the platform. The platform demonstrated 100% system availability. Two months into the new platform’s adoption, no incidents had been detected.

Quantitative Benefit

  • 20x increase in performance and capacity of the data platform

  • Support for 10,000 stations, thanks to cloud infrastructure improvements

  • 100% platform availability, with zero incidents reported since its adoption

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The Zenitaka Corporation ('Zenitaka') has two major business areas: its architectural business focuses on structures such as government buildings, office buildings, and commercial facilities, while its civil engineering business is targeted at structures such as tunnels, bridges and dams. Within these areas, there presented two issues that have always persisted in regard to the construction of mountain tunnels. These issues are 'improving safety" and "reducing energy consumption". Mountain tunnels construction requires a massive amount of electricity. This is because there are many kinds of electrical equipment being used day and night, including construction machinery, construction lighting, and ventilating fan. Despite this, the amount of power consumption is generally not tightly managed. In many cases, the exact amount of power consumption is only ascertained when the bill from the power company becomes available. Sometimes, corporations install demand-monitoring equipment to help curb the maximum power demanded. However, even in these cases, the devices only allow the total volume of power consumption to be ascertained, or they may issue warnings to prevent the contracted volume of power from being exceeded. In order to tackle the issue of reducing power consumption, it was first necessary to obtain an accurate breakdown of how much power was being used in each particular area. In other words, we needed to be able to visualize the amount of power being consumed. Safety, was also not being managed very rigorously. Even now, tunnel construction sites often use a 'name label' system for managing entry into the work site. Specifically, red labels with white reverse sides that bear the workers' names on both sides are displayed at the tunnel work site entrance. The workers themselves then flip the name label to the appropriate side when entering or exiting from the work site to indicate whether or not they are working inside the tunnel at any given time. If a worker forgets to flip his or her name label when entering or exiting from the tunnel, management cannot be performed effectively. In order to tackle the challenges mentioned above, Zenitaka decided to build a system that could improve the safety of tunnel construction as well as reduce the amount of power consumed. In other words, this new system would facilitate a clear picture of which workers were working in each location at the mountain tunnel construction site, as well as which processes were being carried out at those respective locations at any given time. The system would maintain the safety of all workers while also carefully controlling the electrical equipment to reduce unnecessary power consumption. Having decided on the concept, our next concern was whether there existed any kind of robust hardware that would not break down at the construction work site, that could move freely in response to changes in the working environment, and that could accurately detect workers and vehicles using radio frequency identification (RFID). Given that this system would involve many components that were new to Zenitaka, we decided to enlist the cooperation of E.I.Sol Co., Ltd. ('E.I.Sol') as our joint development partner, as they had provided us with a highly practical proposal.
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