Joyride’s latest case study explores how a Fortune 500 data center turned its golf carts and GEM low-speed vehicles (LSVs) into employee time-savings engines through automated fleet management software.
Data centers live and die by minutes. It’s only logical for campus transportation to be AI-powered. So imagine saving $350,000 in operational expenses (equivalent to 2.3 full-time employees) yearly just by introducing scan-and-go vehicle access on campus. Faster response times, smoother employee experiences and more accountable fleets are now infrastructure instead of luxuries.
More than 2 million square feet, 400+ employees and significant savings at stake. Do the mobility math and scroll down for our full case study:
The Customer
Meta: a Fortune 500 technology company operating one of the world’s largest hyperscale data center footprints. Their facilities span thousands of acres, and hundreds of their on-site technicians rely on golf carts and GEM low-speed vehicles (LSVs) to move between server halls, loading docks, network rooms and support buildings. When every trip counts, every minute counts more.
The Challenge: Manual Bottlenecks on a Massive Campus
At sprawling multi-million-square-foot data center complexes, golf carts and LSVs are critical components. At Meta’s Stanton Springs Data Center in Georgia, walking between building clusters and cooling yards wastes valuable technician uptime during every shift.
For the center’s 400+ operational staff, managing a shared fleet the old-fashioned way created daily friction:
Keys constantly misplaced, swapped or locked in the wrong cabinet
Technicians walking to one building just to find an available cart
No visibility into which carts were in use, charged or out of service
Hidden time costs that quietly stacked up across every shift
Multiply that across a shared fleet and the cost to productivity, uptime response and day-to-day experience becomes impossible to ignore.
The Solution: Complete Fleet Automation
Meta engaged Joyride to connect their manually operated vehicles to our global platform at Stanton Springs (also known as NCG), swapping physical keys for a scan-and-go, app-based experience backed by Joyride’s IoT software integrated platform. No attendants, no waiting and no keychains required. In less than 3 minutes, employees open their phones to the data center’s custom-branded app, scan the QR code on the vehicle and drive.
Backend dashboards report instant, real-time visibility into every vehicle on campus and can set geofencing parameters, safety zones and user permissions. Trips are finished with a simple “end ride” prompt, and vehicles are synced with AI performance maintenance tools to ensure crucial safety and battery health protocols are in check.
The Results: Recovering Lost Time, Gaining Crucial Insights and Expansion
The Math: Scaling to 50 Carts
Meta is already saving 11 minutes per trip across their initial deployment, with further expansion plans in the works.
Now, let’s explore the long-term potential of these numbers. Here’s a look at what automation unlocks when Joyride scales across a 50-cart fleet footprint, a realistic size for a general hyperscale campus.
Based on an average of 2 trips per cart per day, 260 working days per year:
The time recovered is equal to more than two full-time employees of capacity handed back to the business, every year, without hiring additional headcount.
The Business Case for Connected Vehicles at Data Centers
At a fully-loaded labor rate of $75/hour for data center technicians, ~4,767 hours of reclaimed capacity translates into roughly $357,500 in recovered productive time each year across a 50-cart deployment. The investment in Joyride pays for itself in under 3 weeks of operation.
Ready to Connect Your Campus?
Enterprise businesses in 550+ global markets are scaling their fleets with the power of vehicle connectivity. See what Joyride can do for your campus, hospitality property or data center operation by contacting us today.
