Taxi Driver Online

the firm i'm with are def going to get this.
They have about 140 cars and have been quoted about a quater of a million.

Does that sound about right?

But will it get an extra £250,000 worth of work?

Methinks the mush signing the cheque must have been given a good meal.

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IDFIMH

i dont know but i do like the system.
point is down here they all have auriga. So its a case of keeping up with the jones.

The problem is, that for a small company like ours, we could never afford it.

The second problem is, sooner or later they will stop supporting the old Auriga... And then, where will the smaller companies be?

Wish I knew the answers.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

Please don't tell me you still haven't got your data sorted.

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IDFIMH

Hi
Auriga will continue to support their exsiting customer for a long time. It will be physically impossible for them to upgrade all of the sites to Evocab over the next year, even at 2 site a week it would take 2 to 3 years to complete.

I read that they have 16 sites running Evocab. Then again there are always alternatives.

But you could be faced with the problems I faced the other week.

I wanted to draw some information out of my system, the old type.

Rang the 'hope' desk and asked if there was a report in there previously described as 'endless report facilities' which would help me find this information.

No one on the Hope desk could tell me anything about the reporting system.

My £500 a month bill for support got me the answer 'you will just have to play around and find the answer yourself, nobody here can help you'.

I was so pleased I rang the mobile number of the man I believed was MD. His number has changed (not the first time).

Rang Auriga and I still await his return of my call.

Next week I guess I might just bump into him.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Q.E.D.

Thank you for that little gem, Tom.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

Sorry Uncle Sus. We are still sorta dataless.

We have meetings with the Council.

We have meetings with the suppliers.

We have meetings with ourselves.

We are made promises that we investigate, and which cannot be kept.

When we introduce the supplier to the Council and arrange a demo in our Council chambers, then everything F***s up. The demo doesn't work. The rep cant remember the prices. The rep isn't sure about aspects of his software. And we are made to look fools in front of the Council.

What happens then? Well, the suppliers approach the Council direct, blank us completely, and make great plays to do a demo to the Council that works. However...

When the Council tell them that WE are the one's actually in control of the budget, they sheepishly ring us back. And what do we say to them?

Well, it begins with an F and ends with an F.

The whole point is flexibility. The flexibility of mind to actually understand what we are after, what the Council are after, and how much it should all cost. They want to quote direct to the Council because they see the Council as having more money and paying a higher price for it. But our County Council are aware of such practices, and want the contractor (us) to cost the project at our risk included in the overall service provision budget. So, while it is the Council who are actually paying for it, its us who have the decision on what "IT" is.

First, we need to see a demo that actually works...

Believe it or not, three suppliers have attended our premises with hardware that was not working. "Oh" they say " Sorry about that, but you can take our word for it that it does work".

We did actually wonder (after he last Autocab visit) whether there was actually anything wrong with our premises that stopped visiting computers from working. There apparently isn't.

Next, we need a price that is belonging to the real world.

Then we need a service contract that does not reward a faulty product.

Apparently, that is all too much to ask for in this high tech world.

I am now a paid up member of The Cynical Party.

We have now decided to wait and see what the new Microsoft Taxi Control System will be like when its released, as at £750 a throw and fully configurable, it could be what we want.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

But apart from that everything is just ticker-tee-boo?

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IDFIMH

Yep. Absolutely fine. Suss. (One of the 233).

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

blimey i dont think our firm had that problem with auriga. But as tom says you pay through the nose.
by all accounts we get evocab in the office end of the year. and in the cabs next year.
not sure about saterlite though. not yet convince.

EvoCab, as with other Auriga product, is quite a good system. However...
(There's always a "however"):

My problem with EvoCab is two-fold:

Initially, it's price. For what EvoCab does, why is it so much more expensive than the others? Is it a better product? I don't actually think so, I am unconvinced.

Secondly, why oh why can they not integrate the accounts data-base into the B&D system. Having the two separate (Ie. EvoCab and Admin 2000) it makes the whole issue so cumbersome that we simply cannot operate it to the system we use at present. If the fleet were entirely owner-drivers EvoCab would be fine, but when you have a mixture of people who run share cars, 60/40 split rentals, PAYE drivers, agency temps (PSV drivers) AND owner drivers (or any combination of above), the fact that the accounts are a separate database makes cashiering impossible to run. Even the Auriga rep said this.

So, when you get several other packages that WILL run this, and are only half the price, you ask yourself the question WHY?

Another problem area for Auriga is their hardware. A company local to us who runs Auriga and is exactly one quarter of our size, has a complete room set aside for computer mainframe hardware. When I asked how much that all cost, he told me £30,000. We run on a handful of PCs from our local PC World. When a PC goes down, we bin it and go and spend another £400 on a new one. I reckon we will need to buy a hell of a lot of PCs before we have spent £30,000 on hardware. Do the sums yourself.
And is their mainframe any quicker than our PCs? Nope. More reliable? Nope. Cheaper to maintain? Nope. It is quite simply, overkill.

It is my considered view, that Auriga is still "Big Company only" orientated and while they are making play to the small companies (with some success, witness our neighbour), the truth is that they still cant get small to medium sized operators into their mindset.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

The problem is that the operators are just trying to keep up with the Jones's.

One buys it, and because he has spent 100s of 1000s he says to the others how good it is. If he said it was a pile of s***, then he would lose all his kudos.

So then all the other operators have to follow suit, because they believe the sales reps chat, that they will lose work etc etc.

Which brings us back to the poor sod that ends up paying for all of this i.e. me.

And will I earn more money out of this supa dupa system? Nope, but the sales reps will.

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IDFIMH

i think it helps out in the office. but for drivers the only benefit is a nice colour screen.
but it is serious money and im not sure if the firm will get serious work out of it.
but it would be nice if the data firms could just do something that could fit in like a cd player. most phones can do what data does. and they are a fraction of the size and price.