Onepark cut ad hoc requests for data in half after picking up Metabase.

The Challenge: Onepark was looking for a BI solution that could centralize all the data sources, standardize key progress indicator calculations, and democratize access to information.

The Solution: Onepark looked for several visualization solutions, and chose Metabase because of its high quality, of its ease of use, and attractive price-quality ratio.

The Results: Onepark’s Business Intelligence team has seen the number of information requests decrease so much that it was able to free up analysts to pursue other, more long-term-focused projects.

"With the help of Metabase our company solved 50% of business analytics demands right away. "

Sasha Magyaroff
Business Analyst at Onepark

Onepark digitalizes the carpark market to make it easier for drivers to find and reserve their carpark space. Onepark’s platform offers its customers a network that currently has more than 2000 carparks in France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy, and Portugal.

Why Metabase?

Onepark has tried different tools to deliver information among the teams and external partners. However, the data sources weren’t centralized, and the tools were either too complicated, or inefficient, as they needed several hours of maintenance to keep the information up to date. Finally, the methodologies weren’t standardized across company teams, which made it difficult to align KPIs.

After benchmarking several visualizations tools and following the advice of a consultant expert in BI solutions, Metabase was the most complete solution in the market. In fact, it had everything the company was looking for: easy to set up (few minutes to connect it to the warehouse and direct access to its functionalities), easy to use, performant, possibility to extract the reports and share them, all at a great price. Finally, the tool allows every employee to easily explore the data, even if they don’t have any technical knowledge.

The data

Onepark centralized the data of its PostreSQL, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, Stripe, among others into a data warehouse. They extract, transform, and load the data into their warehouse every 30 minutes.

How Onepark team uses Metabase

The BI team has created 14 dashboards that centralize the recurring information demands: revenue, expenses, contribution margin, occupancy rates, conversion rates, etc. With these dashboards, 50% of the monthly demands of the company were solved.

Onepark trains teams to ask questions and build dashboards on their own. Metabase’s query builder has greatly improved the autonomy of the teams in terms of information production.

Commonly asked questions include

• “How many bookings have we generated last month?”
• “What is the evolution of the returning customers in time?”
• “What were the top-performing carparks/landing pages during the year?”
• “What is the cost per booking per market?”

The results

Beyond the benefits of democratizing data in the company, Metabase has helped Onepark to improve its efficiency when treating data. The time saved producing custom queries, the ease of accessing the data and treating it autonomously has increased team productivity and and established a data-driven culture in the company.

The ability to track and compare different KPIs in a single interface has helped their managers to make better decisions, as well as simplify the process of accountability to our partners and investors.

Sasha’s advice for others

From a data infrastructure point of view, Sasha recommends carefully defining the needed sources, the KPIs that will be followed and the extraction frequency of the data. The above will be helpful when choosing the ETL, warehouse and visualization tool; in special, when having a restricted budget.

When using Metabase, Sasha has additional recommendations: organize the dashboards, saved questions, and data sets to facilitate/improve the user experience. It is common that when discovering the tool, employees could easily be lost with the number of files that are available. For that, it is important to create categories that group queries and dashboards by subject and have name conventions to be able to identify the needed data easily. Include descriptions in the calculated KPIs facilitates the comprehension of the delivered information. In addition, it is time-saving, as most people have questions with regards to the used methodology.

Train employees in how to use the tool through practical sessions, so that they are autonomous in the extraction and production of information. Create users with different permissions to protect sensitive data.