Wallington Cars Hit the Road Running

Wallington Cars is a private hire cab firm in Wallington, near Croydon, and introduced Alamein’s message, navigation and tracking service (MNTS) technology in April 2008.

Wallington Cars works predominantly in South London, but will carry passengers to any destination required, and it has around 65 vehicles available for hire.

In the control room

Operations manager Steve Carroll is in charge of a team of 13 control room staff, working round the clock to pass bookings on to the drivers out on the road and to handle any problems that arise while the job is in progress.

Steve monitors the constantly changing workload via a screen that gives him access to the booking system, the job list, and a map that shows the position of all drivers working at the time.

“The system has been installed for a short while but already it has made an enormous difference to the way we work and to how efficiently we can handle the system - it’s brilliant,” said Steve.

“Cab offices can be pretty prehistoric in the ways things are done. Habits are hard to break and we were concerned about the guys’ reaction to this new system, but everyone has got used to it very quickly, and I think they realise how much easier it’s making their lives.

“The staff in the control room take the calls and, instead of having to radio the driver, all the information on the booking form goes direct to the driver, the exact address, passenger name, everything.

The tracking technology means that we can see at a glance where each driver is, we know whether he is clear or not, which direction he is travelling in and how fast he is going. It gives us greater awareness of the driver’s movements which is very important for their safety & efficiency among other things.”

On the road

The Alamein technology feeds information between the driver and the control room using a simple touch-screen PDA in the cab and a screen in the control room.

“The screen shows us the booking information and, once the driver has accepted a job, the job changes colour on the screen, so we know he’s got it. When the passenger is on board, he presses another button to tell us he’s on his way. When the passenger is dropped off and is clear, the driver presses another button and we know they are available.”

“We also know exactly where each driver is because of the tracking technology, so we can see at a glance which driver is in the best position to take on which jobs, and offer better service to our customers.

“Before we had this technology, each of these stages would have to have been actioned by a conversation, so it’s saving us a lot of time, costs and misunderstandings.

It also cuts down the amount of return calls asking for more details, telling us they can’t find the address, or whatever the problem might be. Now they have the job details and automatic satellite navigation, so they’re on their way immediately.

“We were able to introduce features onto the drivers’ handsets gradually. We were a little concerned about a sudden change to modern technology and giving the driver too much to remember all at once.

We decided to introduce it gradually, letting them get used to one part of the system before adding more. Some of the drivers had never used anything like this before, but by doing it in stages they have all picked it up easily.”

Flexibility

Wallington Cars has benefited from the flexibility of the Alamein system which allows different applications to be added or left off, depending on the customer’s individual needs.

“The way Alamein has added their software onto our own despatch system has been smooth and the costs have been comparatively low compared with taking out the system we already had and replacing it with new computers and everything else we’d need,” said Steve. “We had looked at other systems, and were impressed by them, but in order to install them we would have needed a complete new computer system, and the overheads were just too high.

“Alamein software is also flexible enough to allow us to add an application that wasn’t there at the beginning, but we knew we wanted. Our drivers are not given the option of whether or not to accept a job; drivers can do that at some companies, but not here.

We wanted something that showed us the driver had received the details, and told us that the driver had opened and read the details, and finally that he had accepted them. That way, the driver can’t say that he didn’t get the job, because we are informed at each stage. If it’s not followed up, then we can contact them on their mobiles to find out what the problem is.

“That function wasn’t standard, but it was no problem at all for Alamein to add it to our system.” Another potential stumbling block came when it was recognised that the two systems used different methods of pinpointing locations.

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