Ridekleen relies on MongoDB Atlas and Realm for productivity, scalability and flexibility delivering a better experience for staff and customers

Introduction

RideKleen is not just a fleet servicing company, it’s an innovation company – disrupting the industry and exciting customers with new products and services that solve challenging problems. It is also a sustainability company – committed to improving the world around us by making the industry more environmentally responsible.
 
When RideKleen was founded in 2013, they provided mobile cleaning services to car fleets, sending service technicians to wherever vehicles were. They were acquired by Cox Automotive in 2018. Cox Automotive has 40,000 auto dealers across five continents aspiring to bridge the gap between consumers, manufacturers, dealers and lenders at every stage of the automotive experience. Today, RideKleen is a national leader in delivering eco-conscious, full-service fleet cleaning, disinfection and maintenance services to a range of shared fleet providers that includes some of the country’s largest car rental and rideshare companies.
 
Mobile technology has always been key to RideKleen’s business. Operations managers and service technicians use RideKleen’s mobile app every day to ensure that stringent quality standards are met. Via the app, they see the location, timing, and job details for every car they touch. Technicians track the execution of their work directly in the app giving managers a real-time view of work as it’s completed.

Realm and MongoDB Atlas on AWS have been a key part of this success, helping RideKleen overcome early challenges as a start-up and providing a cloud-based foundation for their next stage of growth with Cox Automotive.

Start-Up Challenges

RideKleen first started using Realm Mobile Database in 2018, when issues with a legacy mobile application adversely impacted their growth. The team had built the original app to run iPads using Claris FileMaker, and it lacked any data synchronization with RideKleen’s backend. The tech was clunky, expensive to maintain, and limited operations staff and service technicians on the ground.
 
Service technicians in the field could use the mobile app to see scheduled work and record the jobs they had completed, but could not sync to the back office system, Command Center, without physically plugging in to a PC. At times, RideKleen was also losing data. As different users logged in on the same device, data might get lost between back-ups. App performance issues led to app reinstalls which led to losing data stored locally. It was inefficient and technicians resorted to double-entry in cloud spreadsheets to avoid losing job history. All of this meant delays in getting accurate information back into the organization and left administrative or operations staff struggling to respond to clients.
 
RideKleen brought in WeKan, a tech powerhouse that helps companies grow by developing innovative solutions, and scale while leveraging the full benefits of the cloud.

A Successful Acquisition

The first thing WeKan did was centralize data on the backend in a relational database, and replatform the mobile application on Realm’s Mobile Database. Choosing Realm was easy. WeKan recognized that RideKleen needed an offline-first mobile app, so the app would work as expected even when a service technician lacked a strong network connection.
 
By embedding a local datastore directly on the device, the Realm Mobile Database allowed applications to read and write data – and keep working – even when devices were not online. It was simple to use, and fast for WeKan’s developers to build on.
 
Using Realm and Kotlin, they quickly built a new native Android app and developed a custom adapter that synced data from Realm to the backend. The new architecture streamlined communication between field staff and operational teams and made it simple to keep customers up-to-date on the status of work.
 
Just as WeKan was finishing up their first major project for RideKleen, Cox Automotive acquired the start-up, bringing them to a successful exit in October 2019.

Scaling Within the Enterprise

Cox Automotive recognized the potential RideKleen had to expand beyond vehicle disinfection and sanitization by providing a full range of custom vehicle maintenance services to larger customers. However, to achieve that potential, RideKleen’s app architecture would need to evolve again.
 
RideKleen’s enterprise customers needed customized workflows to fit their needs, such as verifying gas levels or documenting a key had been returned. While its newly-built mobile app worked offline and synced data reliably, making it easy to generate and provide service technicians with these new digital forms and workflows for each custom request became tedious.
 
Operations staff would submit a support ticket to the technical team, who would build new fields into the app, update the User Interface and forms, and push it out to the field. This process could take up to two weeks, limiting RideKleen’s ability to respond quickly to customer needs or changes.

Simultaneously, the system was hitting limitations on the relational database. Custom requests and fields were complicating the app’s data architecture, making it difficult to query data and ultimately impacting the application’s performance.

After migrating operations to AWS, WeKan chose MongoDB Atlas, Atlas Data Lake and MongoDB Realm as their application data platform. Atlas offers a fully managed cloud database service with built-in automation, Atlas Data Lake provides federated query capabilities to natively data query across MongoDB and AWS S3, while MongoDB Realm simplifies the critical edge-to-cloud sync and provides backend services to speed development work, including triggers, functions, and GraphQL.
 
On the mobile side, WeKan migrated to MongoDB Realm Sync in order to move data between mobile devices in the field and RideKleen’s backend. “It’s really seamless,” shared Ranjan. “It only took us four weeks, because it’s a native integration between Realm and Atlas on AWS.” By eliminating the need to write thousands of lines of conflict resolution and networking code, Realm Sync makes it simple for RideKleen to sync critical business data reliably and securely.
 
WeKan also re-built the Command Center web portal using Atlas as the operational database and Atlas Data Lake to seamlessly transform data to power a custom-built visualization layer. The new web application now allows engineers and technicians with the right permissions to create new, custom services themselves, update the field in the app and UI, then push it out to the field themselves. When devices are online and synced with the backend, the new field is automatically populated within the app for all users. Back in Command Center, a homegrown dashboard provides total visibility into the current work status.

Using MongoDB Realm’s triggers and functions also allowed WeKan to eliminate custom code that handled RideKleen’s entire scheduling service.

The Results

RideKleen now enjoys a robust, scalable and affordable data backbone that equips its users with the information and tools they need to work more effectively and provide operational updates and feedback in near real-time.

With MongoDB Atlas on AWS, Realm, and Atlas Data Lake powering RideKleen’s technology from end-to-end, RideKleen can deliver a fundamentally better experience to its staff and clients. This new ability to respond almost instantly to new customer needs, has proven particularly valuable during the Covid-19 pandemic when confidence in cleanliness is key.