Sample case study: 640 vehicles moved to continuous dispatch in one weekend

Harbour Cabs ran two dispatch systems after a merger, and a job that crossed the boundary between them was keyed in twice. The cutover to one platform happened between a Friday night and a Monday morning.

The problem with two systems

Each depot kept its own driver list, its own zone map and its own account book. A corporate account that booked from either side of the harbour was two customers, invoiced twice, with two credit limits.

The call centre had two screens. Operators learned which one to use by the pickup suburb, and got it wrong often enough that the complaints log had a column for it.

What the cutover looked like

Drivers, vehicles and accounts were loaded from exports of both systems during the week, with the duplicates merged by registration and ABN. The verification run on Thursday compared a day of real jobs against what FLEET would have dispatched for them.

"We expected to lose the weekend. We lost Friday night, and by Saturday lunch the operators had stopped asking which system a job was in."

Zones

The two zone maps overlapped by about a kilometre along the harbour. The overlap became one shared zone, and the pricing rules for it were agreed on paper before anything was configured.

Accounts

Forty-one corporate accounts existed on both sides. They were merged into one record each, with the higher of the two credit limits and a single statement from the first month.

What changed for the business

One driver pool is dispatched against one demand map, so a vehicle finishing a job on the north side is a candidate for a south-side pickup without a phone call between depots. The month-end statement run went from two days to an afternoon.