Without some form of transport software, it can be difficult to manage your day to day service operations. The nature of transport services means that at a moment’s notice something can change, be it a cancellation, a route change, traffic delays, you name it. Imagine forgetting to pick a passenger up, or indeed losing a passenger at a location because a driver forgot to return or left too early. The consequences would be not only damaging to the transport service provider, but also dangerous for the passengers involved.
Unfortunately, we’re all human and mistakes can happen more than you think, especially without standardised procedures and operational consistencies. Without these in place, your transport team will be pulled in all different directions and service levels will suffer as a result. In the new world of hybrid working, gaining access to important and real-time information is more important than ever and not just from the office.
Transport software brings people and organisations together so that you work more efficiently whether from home or in the office.
Transport software brings everything together. An operating system to your day to day. Not only will a software like Road XS automate and replace a lot of the tedious manual work, it will also speed up your information retrieval, keep your records up to date, remind you when information is out of date, and keep you informed in real-time of what is happening.
If you’re looking to improve efficiency in your organisation and to get more from your existing drivers and vehicles with less effort than ever before, then transport software would be your best investment.
Focus On What’s Important Right Now
If you are operating from paper or a spreadsheet, it can be very difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve an instant snapshot of your transport services right now. This can hamper decision-making and slow down response times. With a transport software in place like Road XS, you can retrieve information in an instant, be it in the form of a report or a dashboard. This enables you to focus, keep your cool and provide an exceptional service.
Stay in Control and Work as a Team
With an operating environment that can change in an instant, it’s important your organisation can adapt. This might mean allocating a new driver, changing vehicles, or quickly updating an appointment time. Journey management becomes crucial in terms of maintaining control. Not only that, dashboard and views on your information enable you to get a sense of calm, that you haven’t missed something, that all you need is in front of you now. This can reduce stress levels and anxiety, especially amongst transport teams. Each member will be working on a common goal and collaboration and productivity naturally increases as a result. This is also because everyone can see what is going on and happening around them. Transport software brings people and organisations together including your admin staff, drivers, staff and locations so that you can better integrate and share the workload.
Respond Instantly
Have you ever timed how long it takes you to respond to a passenger request that comes in via phone or email? Try it. It will give you a real insight into how responsive your transport services are. In Road XS, it takes a matter of between 3-8 seconds to find the information you need on a journey, passenger or driver. This includes the passenger informing you of the journey details. With an integrated transport software (where everything is intrinsically linked), this is an incredibly efficient way of keeping records and data together.
Know Where People Are
With so many things going on, the last thing you need to do is worry about whether the right driver or vehicle is on the right job. This is where workflow optimisation and automation comes in. The greatest benefit of software and technology in general is to be able to do more with less. In reality, this means pressing a button and steps happening. For example, in Road XS you can assign a driver without needing to think, then equally with GPS tracking enabled see where that driver is on a map in real-time, complete with What3Words integrated location data. You might think, why is this so important? Well, it depends on your transport services. This is especially useful if you are running patient transport and need to know exactly where an ambulance is.
Capture Data and Learn From It
We hear a lot how important data is and the importance in capturing it. But capturing data is one thing, that’s the easy part, it’s what you do with it that counts. You can capture data, for example in paper form and even on a spreadsheet. But can you press a button and instantly see trends on how your service is operating, or how efficient one journey was compared to another. Equally, can you instantly see what cancellations have happened this month and whether you have enough staff in each day to handle the busiest times? Responding to data and taking action is the key step to getting the most from your transport software.
Optimise Your Routes and Capabilities
It’s only 5 minutes down the road. Famous last words. It’s actually 12.3 minutes down the road, not 6 miles but 6.72 and there’s a one way street involved which means the driver has to wait 8 seconds at the traffic lights before turning left and along a road that has speed restrictions due to a local school. If you have local knowledge, you’ll know all this. But if you don’t, and you have a new team member, how do you capture this? With Road XS smart route technology this is all factored in along with passenger loading times, transit times, capacity and time slacks. The calculations required happen in a moment and ensure that services keep moving no matter what’s in the way. This is vital for running a fully optimised Dial a Ride or Demand Responsive Transport service. You can’t compute the variables without some form of transport software running in the middle. The first software to fully optimise Dial a Ride services on the market was Road XS.
Remove Mistakes
With automated workflows and data reminders, mistakes get reduced, and even irradiated. For example, when did you last check up on your driver records? Do you even need to? Well, you should do, but the good news is that with transport software this can be automated, and you can receive prompts to check in with a driver over the records. Indeed, within Road XS driver’s can’t be allocated to journeys unless all the driver records such as MOT information, driver licensing and DBS checks (if required) are up-to-date. Transport software instils standards through workflows and repeating steps over and over, reducing data entry errors and organising data quickly and efficiently.
Summary
There are a number of other features and benefits that transport software can bring to an organisation. If you’re not sure where to start, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Switching software and technologies can be daunting. However, the best place to start is to have the end in mind and ask yourself some key questions along the way, this might include the following five searcher questions:
- How do we want to work?
- Where do we want to work?
- How much could we automate?
- How stressed do I feel operating our services?
- What would be our ideal software features?
We’re more than happy to help you on your journey and are readily available to answer any questions you might have. Feel free to contact us and also to look through our community resources which might also help you on your journey.
