Taxi Driver Online

The firm I now drive for have the Auriga CT system running on PDA's, as you all know I came from a firm that ran Mercury on PDA and as most of you know it was a bag of shit.

I've been informed today by one of the drivers that the owner is having Mercury installed.

The Auriga system has been like a breath of fresh air to me after working with a sack of shit Mercury system that's down more times than it's been working, can't tell the closest car to the job, sends two cars for one job etc etc.

I wonder what sales patter Mr Moores sales staff have been peddling out?? Have they been using the old chestnut, "all the others are going bankrupt" and there's only us that's left in the market??

I wouldn't wish Mercury on my worse enemy.

I'd like to hear from Daz who stripped his Mercury out adding to the growing number of firms who are ditching Mercury.

You couldn't make this up.

You don’t seem to have a lot of luck Nige, sort of out of the frying pan into the fire.

It’d be interesting to hear why they decided to change given by your account they had a perfectly good working system. I’m guessing, but in a depressed market where money is tight, if a system is coming to the end of it’s serviceable life, then the company might not want or be able to afford Auriga prices for a second time round. On paper, Mercury looks every bit as good as any other system and it’s probably a lot cheaper than Auriga. Only time will tell if this is a right decision but one would hope that the management has done their research and not just swallowed up the sales patter.

As for the likes of us going bankrupt, I don’t think so. I’ve made damn sure that the structure of my business is stable and doesn’t rely on making new sales. That said, we’ve never been so busy, installing right up to Christmas Eve including three Mercury and one Auriga migrations. That’s not bad for a company that doesn’t advertise (blows own trumpet what the heck!) It’s the companies with large sales forces and traditionally high costs that need to worry.

Anyway, keep you chin up Nige, if it wasn’t for stuff like this you’d have nothing to complain about!

Bill

Hi Bill, me complain I don't know what you are on about.

The Auriga system is only a year old, I don't know why he's on about taking it out when it works perfectly.

As you know I wasn't a fan of these PDA systems after my experience with the pile of shit Exel churn out I'm coming round to the them quickly.

Working with a system that doesn't lose connection and is stable as anything is a refreshing change after working with the pretty coloured screens Exel market as Taxi Dispatch software.

Can’t make people come on here to tell you how they find things Nige but I’ve just spoken with one of the companies that changed last month and I asked the direct question for you. You’re going to have to trust me that I tell you honestly what they said.

They said their existing system just wasn’t coping at the busy times and that it crashed out far too often. They wanted to merge with another larger company (one of ours) and needed to know that the system could cope. They said that since the move, they’ve had no problems despite now averaging well over 30,000 jobs a week. They say the jobs can be booked in far quicker now and overall they’re extremely pleased with how everything has gone.

Another company local to this one saw what had happened and they decided to do the same and their comments are almost carbon copy. Company number three is in a different town but again where we have a very strong presence and they will make the changeover at the end of this month.

Bill

That's what I wanted to hear Bill, I've never doubted any of your advice after all you invented data dispatch. Were any of these companies running Exel's Mercury system??

Yes they all were.

We've not changed any hardware or PDAs or network providers so read into that what you will!

I'm going to bail out on this one now Nige, I don't want to appear to be pushing our system, thats not what I come here for.

Bill

How much do they want for the Auriga system they are taking out Nige

Dunno mate I'm trying to persuade him to keep it in and not switch over to Exel's system. I know where there's a Mercury system going cheap software, PDA's computers the lot.

no thanks,i would sooner use pen and paper

I can only echo what Bill has been told by others, since the changeover from Mercury to Datamaster, our 'system' is much more reliable and hardly crashed. We still use old PDAs and still using Vodafone sims. Therefore, it must be what's running in the office.
I've got to admit i received a lot of grief from drivers/operators at first, but once they got used to the datamaster way, almost everyone agreed it was worth it

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Datamaster don't need a sales team, they have happy customers doing it for them
Nidge for Prime Minister

F**K it is all I'm going to say on this matter.