CASE STUDY
Airport transfer dispatch system
Orders, drivers, vehicles and trip tracking now sit in one system, replacing manual dispatch run by phone and Excel. Dispatchers assign jobs and track status from the back office, and fares and driver commissions are reconciled automatically from trip records, so month-end no longer means checking every line by hand.
RESULTS
What this project changed
- -70%
- Dispatch handling time
- 1,500+
- Orders per month handled automatically
The problem
The core of a transfer business is matching four facts: who drives, when the vehicle leaves, which vehicle is used, and which passenger is collected. This operator ran the whole process on the phone and in Excel. Staff logged each booking in a spreadsheet, then called drivers one by one to confirm who was free, and updated the roster by hand.
- A single booking lived in call notes, a spreadsheet and a driver's verbal confirmation, with no single source of truth.
- When a job was moved or cancelled, the roster and the driver's understanding drifted apart, causing double dispatch or missed pickups.
- Month-end reconciliation meant checking trip sheets, fares and driver commissions line by line, which produced fixed overtime every month.
What we did
We brought orders, drivers, vehicles and trip tracking into one system, so dispatch moved from phone confirmation to assignment in software.
- A new booking goes straight into the pending queue, and dispatchers assign it by vehicle type, time slot and the driver's current status.
- Drivers receive the job and report departure, arrival and completion, and trip status updates the back-office board as they go.
- Fares, surcharges and driver commissions are calculated from trip records, so reconciliation data comes out of the system directly at month-end.
Results
With dispatch handled by the system instead of by phone, the same staff took on more bookings.
- Dispatch handling time fell by about 70%, and staff no longer make repeated calls for a single booking.
- The system handles more than 1,500 bookings a month automatically, and peak hours are no longer limited by how fast the phone is answered.
- Reconciliation data comes straight from trip records, so month-end no longer depends on comparing spreadsheets by hand.
CONSTRAINTS
Constraints
The conditions that were fixed from the start. The trade-offs behind the approach only make sense once you know them.
This was not a new business starting from nothing but an operation running every day, so a few conditions were fixed from the outset.
- Bookings could not stop during rollout. Phone dispatch had to keep working, with a full switchover once dispatchers knew the new process.
- Fares and driver commissions follow the operator's existing calculation. The system only makes that calculation faster and more accurate, and does not change how drivers are paid.
- Drivers use it while driving, so reporting had to be short enough to finish at a red light and never require a trip back to the office.
- Trip records include passenger names and addresses, so they are visible only to dispatchers and the driver on that job, not to the whole company.
HOW IT WORKS
Technology and integrations
What the system connects to, how the data moves and why those choices were made — written so that no technical background is needed.
What this system really does is pull one booking, previously spread across phone calls, Excel and a driver's memory, into a single shared record.
- Orders, drivers, vehicles and trips share one set of data. Each driver report changes the status on the dispatch board directly, with no second transcription.
- Reconciliation data is not a separate report but the result the system calculates once a trip is complete. Month-end is an export, not a line-by-line comparison.
- When a job moves or is cancelled, the system releases the slot back to the pending queue, so the same driver is never double-booked for the same time.