This is something we often get asked at Road XS and English language semantics aside, the run sheet is actually an important part of the community transport world. At it’s core, a run sheet is a set of instructions of who you are picking up, where and when. Run sheets used to be something reserved just for dial a ride and group travel journeys, but we also think they are vital to voluntary car schemes and car share.
At Road XS, our run sheet is built right into the route planner and it enables admins to organise their trip in a really user-friendly manner. The driver portal in Road XS also includes an interactive run sheet where the driver can mark off their pickups and drop-offs so that admins know where they are on their route, but what else can a run sheet do?
Keeps Your Driver Organised
Having a run sheet keeps your driver organised and if you like to the script. Road XS optimises your routes to calculate the best routes and order to pickup your passengers. Imagine if the driver then goes off script and zg-zagged his way all that optimisation would be lost.
Your Run Sheet Should Be Fluid
Most platforms produce a sheet and the driver prints it off the night before or first thing in the morning. The thing is, life happens and trips and requirements change. In operating from a static run sheet you might lose vital information. With a fluid run sheet you ensure that if anything changes your driver is immediately updated. In Road XS we call this ‘Active Response’.
Provide Auditing and Standards
A run sheet can help enforce standards to ensure your vehicle leaves once the required vehicle safety checks have been completed. This can be built right into the process to ensure you go over and above what’s required. It can also sign-off before a trip takes place, a bit like a plane gets signed off from the ground staff before it’s allowed to take off.
Provide Clarity
Sometimes, you think that route looks good to me or seems ok in my head, but then you put it out there into the real world and something looks off. A run sheet provides that moment of clarity to say yes that route and order looks correct or, lets go back to the drawing board.
Provide Continuity
With a visual and real-time sheet this means that any driver can pickup where the other driver left off from. Sometimes drivers get ill or have somewhere else to be at a moments notice. You can allocate the journey to any other driver, and they’ll know exactly where to be, at what time and how to get there.
With journeys and routes changing all the time we took the time in to make sure that the vital run sheet is the key piece of information you can rely on. It also means your team can review routes you have taken and to optimise journeys and resources further. With real-time reporting built into Road XS you have never been better equipped to make decisions about your transport services. Hopefully this now helps answer the question, if not….let us know!
