The linchpin of EmpireCLS‘ 24/7 operation was their dispatching department; dispatchers orchestrating passenger pickups by chauffeurs has a direct impact on both revenue and the bottom line. The dispatchers were struggling on a daily basis and were in dire need of help; they were fielding customer complaints, chauffeur complaints, and were under constant scrutiny from management regarding excessive payroll, vehicle maintenance, and customer service issues.
The legacy application was extremely difficult to change, EmpireCLS could not keep up with the necessary enhancements and bug fixes required to meet their ever evolving business needs. Coding changes took 3 times longer when compared to a more modern technology, so development costs were higher than needed to be. Automated testing was impossible because of improper application design, so manual testing costs were high and production issues were frequent. They were losing tens of thousands of dollars a year in service issues from bugs, and the inability to enhance the software because of technology constraints.
To fix this problem, EmpireCLS looked to me for help. Working closely with Jon Kragh, form Proactive Logic Inc., we were able to deliver a state of the art real-time vehicle dispatching application within a 12 month period, successfully coming in under budget and on time. As the project was coming to a successful completion, the COO shared a story with us about another limo company that had attempted to build the same type of application, and how they failed after spending millions of dollars.
The new application solved the myriad of issues that plagued EmpireCLS for years. At the end of the day, the application was also able to decrease operational costs by tens of thousands of dollars a year by cutting down chauffeur overtime, decreasing customer service issues, and optimizing dispatcher workflows. The dispatchers became more effective in what they did, because we were effective in what we did; quick iterations of application changes coupled with immediate stakeholder feedback guaranteed that the right solution was discovered quickly and efficiently.
In the months that followed the applications first release, there were many enhancements made that continued to save money operationally. Because the application was developed with future enhancements in mind, and was able to be fully regression tested after each change, it was low risk and extremely fast to continuously evolve it. By automating the deployment of the application it was low friction to push out changes to users on a monthly, weekly, and even daily interval. Scripted regression testing and deployments are the foundation that developer efficacy is built upon, and what enables the discovery of the optimal business solution sooner.
A few years later, EmpireCLS was looking to offer their own on-demand service like Uber, but using their own fleet of vehicles. EmpireCLS would need to have total control over their fleet inventory and would need to make split second decisions in order to commingle advanced bookings with on-demand requests.
Again, EmpireCLS looked to me for help. And again, I worked closely with Jon Kragh from Proactive Logic Inc. It took a year to complete this project, and the results were astounding. Vehicle routes were optimized, 60% of manual work by dispatchers was automated, and more customer requests were met. Certain tasks that would take a dispatcher 4 hours to do now only took 5 minutes, the process was still manual but the heaving lifting was now done by an algorithm.
EmpireCLS could’ve gone another way with these projects, they could’ve chosen to use a large team of analysts, development managers, architects, QA testers, and developers. But instead, they paid 2 high priced consultants that knew how to get stuff done, how to meet business objectives, how to delight users, and how to work at an optimal level of effectiveness.
Would you like to experience success like this for yourself?