Taxi Driver Online

Merry Xmas to you ITK.

As you show very well, the Evocab system can only see as far as the horizon.

Funny how that 'wish list'exists already on the cordic system.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

Bill. I think you are wrong to assume that Auriga work the same way as you do Bill. Whenever I have asked you questions, you have given me straight and honest answers, even to the point of not selling your system.

I cannot say the same of Auriga. I have spoken to people on the sales stand at shows who seem to have less knowledge of their own system than I do. And I dont have Auriga, and know little about it, by comparison with what I expect their sales people to know. The difference, is that I CAN speak to you. It is difficult to get such direct responses from the bigger companys. That leaves me in the position of having more trust in one company than another, to the point where you respect one persons answers more than anothers.

Even with a relatively limited knowledge of a subject in technical terms, an operator/driver often has enough knowledge of the business itself, to know when a salesman is hedgeing away from an honest answer. It tends to be the bigger firms that are the worst in this respect, but not always.

At the last Telford show, I visited the stands of ALL the software providers. I asked, all of them, if they supported real time multiple pick and multiple drop algorithms with street level routing for the operation of Taxi Buses with up to 8 seperate pick up and drops on each booking.

You may remember that I also asked you this question. You said, words to the effect that you didnt, and had quite a chat with me on here and in PMs saying that you didnt see DataMaster developing it our time scale as it was a big project and you were not big enough in terms of the programming time it would take.

However...

Of the other suppliers I asked, one said it was simple and that they supported it already and would simply need to do a few adjustments to accommodate it ( a smaller company) = This was a downright lie.

Three other companys salesman said their systems already had it (including Auriga), but, when they referred to a higher authority, came back to us and said they didnt.

One company, offered to develop it and add it to their system for £20,000 (which we thought was a good price. In fact, too good a price, thus questioning the credibility of the quote somewhat. The credibility of the quote being restored some time later when we heard they had gone into liquidation).

Several said they were looking at it for the future, but not in our time scale.

One, said they already had it, but not quite in real time, but so close as to be effective for us. And they did. They later demonstrated it on our machines in our own office.

We left the show believing there were 5 potential suppliers. It turned out there was only one. But it took us several months to find this out, due to at best, missleading and uninformed comments from salesmen.

Which was a shame, because the one left in the pot, couldn't handle our cashiering system, as their accounts database was not integral to the package. Damn, we said.

And I STILL dont have the new system I want.

And what do I hear on the grapevine as feedback from the suppliers?

I hear that I am too demanding a customer !!! (And thats the polite ones)
Mercury effectively told me that I am just a bloody time waster.

Knowing the kind of budgets I have available, I am a little surprised by some of the responses.

No doubt others will say I have unrealistic aspirations.

The angle now, however, is can we develop such a system ourselves by buying a source code licence to develop an existing system.

The truth is, I dont think we can, as we dont have the time. But thats life.

Sorry, I have rambled a bit.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

Have you ever thought of getting into programming Andy7 - you could probably design the ideal system yourself

As an aside, do any of the guys who design/code these systems have any direct industry experience?

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Taxi Driver Online
www.taxi-driver.co.uk

I'm not into code, but we have an IT man on the firm who is. The problem is time. To write a simple program takes thousands of man hours to do it properly.

We might stand a better chance of altering an existing program, but they wont let you have the source code for stuff like Evocab and the like.

Yup. I am a pain in the backside. But I cannot see the point in buying a system that wont do what we want.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

It would be nice to think that we can write software to meet the exact needs of every company but the reality is that just providing for the mainstream taxi business takes a huge amount of time and effort. I wouldn’t recommend anyone trying to write a booking and dispatch program from scratch, it’s just not viable to do. I know of one company that did just this and employed a professional programmer to do the work for them. It took over two years to get to the point where it was reliable and cost the company over £50k. Their idea was that having paid to have the code developed, then they would be able recoup the development costs by selling it to other companies. Good idea but nobody would touch it because it was written specifically to meet their needs rather than the general trade.

It’s a difficult one Andy because your exact needs are pretty far removed from what most people want. Tell you what though, over the next week or so I’ll give it some thought on how our software could be made to work in conjunction with a third party route planning package. In that way, your programmer friend could write independent code that simply shared the same database files. No promises but I will have a talk with our main programmer and get back to you.

Meanwhile have a good Christmas, be merry but not that merry you fall over!

Bill

Mercury told me I was a spy working for other software companies because I was talking to other users at the show and obviously knew people.

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A member of the Hire or Reward Industry

I was thinking more of a career move for you Andy7

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Taxi Driver Online
www.taxi-driver.co.uk

Thats Brilliant Tom.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

So presumably it would be unfeasible to develop a mega-system that could be easily configured to accomodate each end-user's particular needs?

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Taxi Driver Online
www.taxi-driver.co.uk

I understand totally what you are saying Bill. But if someone did what we are after off-the-shelf for £50,000 I wouldn't consider that a bad price.

I just imagine that we cannot be the only people in the world looking for a taxibus extension to our programme. With the level of government support for such ventures at the moment, I imagine this to be a growth area for the taxi business in the future. Most of the costs for such software can be recouped from Government subsidies if one plays the game properly.

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

Yup. TDO. Thats what we were told Evocab was originally. But in reality it didnt turn out to be that.

The main features where Evocab does not suit us are:

1. Lack of Taxibus support.
2. Lack of integral database for accounts. (As we are a fleet-owned circuit with only one or two independent owner-drivers, we need to be able to cash up the cars by the controller, when there are no other office staff about. For that, you need an integral accounts database which can be accessed 24-hours by front office staff, but, sufficiently secure so as not to allow access to other parts. This brings in the second concern over VAT. That is, that all our PAYE drivers are VAT inclusive fares, whereas owner-drivers and their journeymen are not. It gets very complicated. Our VAT office tells us that none of the taxi packages are VAT approved for this purpose, thus, needing the whole to be exported to Sage. But, as the export is Excell-orientated, none of the links are dynamic, and the controller therefore cannot do the job, and we are not big enough to warrant keeping cashier staff in the office 24 hours a day).

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There is Significant Unmet Demand for my Opinion.

sounds good in the office. not so good out on the roads.
in those 15 seconds a driver could change point. and aruiga does love a point/zone to be a small as poosible.
so where if a job was sent straight away there would have been a car to do the job. now he has gone.
and drivers really dont like going back from whence they came. when they didnt have too.
so it fails when its busy.
as for when its quiet. whats the point of delaying a job if you have 10 cars bookesd on a point/zone.

Hi cgull.

During those 15 seconds, the system is making the best choice for despatch. If you change zone, then you will be allocated points based upon the zone you are now in, for the job in the zone you moved from and for any zones within the search pattern - including the new zone you are in (ever been in a situation where you were given a job for the zone you just actually left, or worse, left some time ago requiring the need to turn round!!).

Imagine it the other way round - You are sitting in a zone looking through the bidding screen and notice a zone you would like to bid for work on. Noone else is there, so you bid. Imagine you are bidding from 10 zones away, but someone bidding from 30 zones away gets the job first - because they bidded first. This would be wrong - you would then be upset that they got the job before you - especially because you are closer.

Imagine finally that you were plotted in to a zone 1 second after another car bidded - wrong again - you should get the job because you are closest.

Different despatch mechanisms can be set up for different times of the day, so if, during busy times 15 seconds was OK, but when it was quiet it would be better being 5 seconds or even less, speak to your office - this is something that can be configured.

Regards and, Happy New Year

Strange that a system is geared to help the minority of vehicles, at the expense of the majority. A sort of PC PC despatch system.

From my experience customers when booking 5/6/7/8 seaters, or WAV vehicles, are quite willing to wait longer. So there is no reason why the non-standard car can't do the normal job first and then go back for the non-standard one.

One other point is that I can't see the benefit of evocab for the 100% black cab circuits. As they are all the same, then why would you need to delay a job? I suppose that's ditto for circuits that only have 4 seater saloons.

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IDFIMH

OK, fair enough but, exactly how long should a customer who requested an 8 seater be expected to wait for their vehicle?

The point is, that there are potentially more 'small' vehicles than 5,6,7,8 seaters out working, and at the end of the day, who know how long the 'smaller vehicle' job is going to take?

We all now know that the evocab system despatches jobs on a points basis. At it's most basic, all vehicles score the same number of points for each job. Additional points can be added to a 'rarer' vehicle BUT ONLY when the rarer vehicle is being offered (for example) a saloon job AND an 8 seater job. As most fleets tend to have more saloons than 8 seaters, there is more likelyhood that a saloon car is going to come free sooner than another 8 seater. If this is not the case, then the 8 seater would not be considered as 'rare' and as such would not score additional points getting it to do the 8 seater job first. In this instance (where there are no extra points), the job waiting the longest would be despatched first.

The above also outlines how a black cab only fleet may be confiured - as every job is an 'any car' (i.e. black cab) job, there is no rarer vehicle *unless* the customer needs something special, i.e. non liverd, white cab, etc etc etc..

Hope this helps
Regards