Service Extension

From Challenge to Opportunity to Pilot to Scale

So Many Bikes, Not so Many Mechanics

The Challenge
Divvy is Chicago’s bicycle share system and the second largest in North America with over 5000 bicycles and 500 stations available 24 hours/day, 7 days/week, 365 days/year. It is required to have 90% or more of its bike fleet on the streets in safe working order. At the height of the busy season, they had only about 87-88% out and operable. There was little budget for hiring new mechanics and most of the talent pool had already been vacuumed up by the local bike shops. There was also a trend of a higher rate of breakdowns since the previous year. The service department was under the gun to come up with a way to meet the contractual obligations. There was also displeasure amongst the mechanics at being made to work new schedules that included weekends.

Vans Slow - Bikes Fast

Insights to Opportunity
My initial research work focused on interviews with mechanics, learning about the challenges of increasing the number of repairs being completed a day. That led to interviewing retrieval staff about the challenges of retrieving bicycles in a crowded urban center. We learned there was a policy that any bikes brought back to the shop had to have a full check-up when they got repaired while bikes in the field got a safety check monthly. Several mechanics had also worked in the bicycle delivery industry and spoke of how quickly they could get around traffic downtown and along the Chicago lakefront. Both areas could be very tricky for retrieval vans to navigate. The drivers who picked up broken bicycles sometimes found that they sat in traffic for up to 45 minutes to travel five blocks! We knew we were on to something but to move forward on a solution that employees could rally around and that benefited the company we had to determine what the challenge was. I did a series of How Might We statements and ran them past the service department to see what vibed and what did not. I then put together an actor map to identify who was connected to who. This led to a round of supervisory staff interviews to learn what their needs were and how the departments affected each other. Knowing that there would need to be communication and coordinating movements in the field, I spoke with dispatch staff to learn how their roles would be a part, how they would be affected, and what systems would need to be considered.

Fix It Where It’s At Is Less Work

Opportunity to Action
We began doing inexpensive small tests outside of the shop, spearheaded by a former bike mechanic who was on the retrieval team. He would do small repairs rather than bringing the bikes back to the warehouse. I got with him to track how many bikes he was keeping on the road and to experiment with different types of repairs to see what would work and what tools were needed. This began to show us how the core service idea would work and what would enable it at a minimum.

The mechanics at Divvy are very good at what they do.  They are by nature tinkerers and perfectionists. They like things running smoothly.  They also get bored after awhile doing the same thing day after day, so they were game for creating a service that would get them outside while making their lives easier. I did a couple of small workshops with senior mechanic staff. One was on determining the key steps of the service. I used this to sketch out a storyboard of what the service would look like and had it redrawn by a member of the team with an industrial design background and better illustration skills than I possessed. The other workshop was on rapid iterative prototyping, which was a pretty easy concept for them to grasp. Using what Divvy already had laying around their workshop, we assembled a trailer filled with spare parts and a toolkit. Next, I led them in role-playing doing repairs in the field by riding up to bikes in the shop and repairing them as they would have to on the streets. We learned which repairs were doable and which weren’t and why. We also learned how many spare parts and tools could safely be carried by bicycle trailers. As all this was going on I was filling out a business model canvas.

We learned that for the service department to get behind any solution that would really make a difference, they had to feel listened to in regards to how that solution could work. For ground-level management to support it they needed to understand the research results and clearly see what the service could look like and how it would make their lives easier. For them to be allowed to send mechanics out into the field, they had to be cleared by corporate. The business case needed to be more than words and numbers. It needed to set out the whole story from start to finish of how the service would happen in a visual manner while having all the processes and numbers readily available.  It needed to be easy for everyone – from mechanics all the way up to the COO – to work with.

Once we had corporate approval, I led two senior mechanics in a journey mapping workshop to better understand what different roles would face, what the interactions and touchpoints would be,  and foresee any problem areas. I learned that brainstorming and focused analytical service thinking can be really hard and exhausting for some people.

Happy City - Happy Staff - Happy Business

Results
Working with team members from the service and retrieval departments, I built the business case for a mobile service technician that would go to high-use areas by bicycle and complete selected repairs in the field. This was a change from the process Divvy had in place of sending a van to pick up the disabled bikes and bringing them back to the service department. A mechanic on a bicycle can easily get to and set up in busy areas where a van had a lot more trouble, saving up to an hour of work time. The initial business case included a business model canvas, a step-by-step storyboard, and testimonials from key employees on why they believed a mobile technician service would work.

The number of completed repairs a day by technicians in the field as opposed to in the shop went from around 5 to 20, a 400% increase! For every mechanic in the field, there was one less retrieval van load brought back to the shop, saving the Divvy approximately 1500 gallons of diesel fuel a year per mechanic. According to carbonindependent.org this also meant a reduction of their carbon footprint by 3542 kg of CO2 a year per reduction of van off the street. The service department increased the number of operable bikes in the field to 92%. The mechanics have also reported feeling happier about their job and looking forward to their turns going out into the field. Divvy has scaled the service several times and has even begun using custom-built pedal-powered mobile repair tricycles.