Thursday 18 February 2016

Dimensional Model for Uber

COMPANY BACKGROUND


Uber Technologies Inc. is an online transportation network company with its headquarters in San Francisco, California. It provides services in 58 countries and 300 cities worldwide. The company develops and operates the Uber mobile app which allows customers to request for a trip through their smartphones. Once a ride request is confirmed, the driver and riders are connected through GPS allowing both parties to track each other’s location. The total fare amount for each ride is calculated as a base fare with additional per-minute and per-mile charges. All payments from charging the customers to depositing money to the driver’s account after deducting a fee are processed by the company in the background keeping the entire transaction completely cashless.

Uber offers the following services based on the different types of customers:
· UberX: It is the least expensive service with a maximum capacity of 4 passengers.
· UberXL: This service provides the customers with an SUV or a minivan. This can seat 6 passengers and has higher prices as compared to UberX.
· UberSelect: This is a premium service offered by Uber where the customer gets to travel in a luxury sedan.

As of 2014, Uber had 100,000 trips per week in each of the largest cities and hundreds of thousands of active users in those cities.

PERFORMANCE METRICS

The important metrics that would be need to be tracked for performance analysis of Uber would be:
 Number of Active Users
The number of users that are actively using Uber for transportation purposes.
Number of Active Drivers
Uber provides its drivers flexibility and has low barriers of entry. This leads to a lot of drivers testing Uber but the continuation rate reduces over time.
Total Trips per Week
This is the total number of trips that are made per city in a week.
 Revenue
The revenue earned by Uber varies according to various factors such as the rates that customers are charged – regular or surge prices, the commission fee of 20-25% that Uber deducts from each fare amount etc.
Average driver ratings
This is the average of all the ratings a driver gains from the users. It can be helpful to track the performances of drivers.

These are the metrics that Uber would be interested in analyzing in order to determine the effectiveness of their business. However, for the dimensional model below I will be considering only the revenue and the total trips per week.

DIMENSIONAL MODEL


The dimensional model which can be used to measure these two metrics would be a Periodic Snapshot table which will capture the ride details on a weekly basis. The Periodic Snapshot table has been chosen because we need to model the business process (in this case, the details of a ride) at a regular interval i.e. weekly.
The grain of the fact table will be the total number of trips made by drivers in each week. The dimensions involved would be Customers, Drivers, Pickup and Drop Location and Week. Instead of the Date dimension, I have used the Week dimension to represent the time period at a higher level of detail. 


REFERENCES
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_(company)
2. http://time.com/3556741/uber/

2 comments:

  1. what about having location as a role dimension for both pick-up and drop off?

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    Replies
    1. Yes. I feel the same that location as a role playing dimension would be a good fit here.

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