How Autohopper Significantly Improved Their Mendix Application

Autohopper is the straightforward car rental service in the Netherlands. If you need to rent a car or a van, Autohopper has you covered. With over 100 locations, Autohopper is the car rental service with the most extensive network in the Netherlands. To manage their services effectively, they utilize a Mendix application. The existing application received a rating of 2 from Autohopper's franchisees, prompting them to engage Emixa to optimize the app.

Recently, Autohopper launched its new desktop application, a sophisticated tool allowing both fleet managers at the headquarters and Autohopper rental agents to work quickly and efficiently. This new application now receives an impressive rating of 8.5 from the franchisees!

Optimizing the Existing Mendix Application

Joey Baten, one of the developers of this app, shares insights into the project. "Autohopper already had a Mendix application programmed by another party. The plan was for me, along with a team consisting of another developer and a UX designer, to optimize the entire Autohopper application in three months. However, the application had such significant flaws that this proved unattainable. Therefore, I stayed with Autohopper for an additional three months after the initial period, addressing various issues 'under the hood' to provide the application with a much-improved foundation."

Application Accessibility at Autohopper

Joey explains, "The initial application often went offline at 8:00 in the morning. This is not ideal considering that Autohopper rents out cars, and the rental period begins in the morning. Customers would be at the dealership, and employees couldn't access the system. As a makeshift solution, they took notes, which they later entered into the application. We, of course, resolved this issue. Additionally, a significant amount of time was spent fixing errors in the application and identifying illogical structures."

New Features in the Autohopper Application

In addition to resolving issues in the existing application, new features were introduced. "We created a new reporting interface, among other things. Now, if a number of identical new cars are added to the fleet, the fleet manager no longer has to manually register each individual car with, for example, the insurance. This process is now fully automated.

"What's really exciting to see is that the trust of Autohopper's franchisees grew tremendously during the project," Joey continues. "There wasn't much trust at the beginning, but you can see that they are gradually understanding the process better, and the sprints and user stories are becoming more refined. And when some of the requests gathered by the product owner actually made it into the application, you could see them thinking, 'It can be done!' That was a really cool moment."

One Application for Everyone at Autohopper

Joey mentions that the application was quite fragmented when he started the project. "That was my biggest challenge. How do you turn a fragmented landscape into one logically functioning whole? Ultimately, we succeeded, but there are still some wishes from Autohopper, such as a mobile app. Who knows, maybe we'll get to work on that in the future? Right now, the most important thing is that Autohopper is happy and that their employees can work much more efficiently."

Read the entire customer case here 

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