Introduction

PT&A are one of the UK's largest vehicle testing companies with clients including McLaren, Jaguar Land Rover, Aston Martin and MG.

The company test drives vehicles on the public road and on specialist vehicle testing grounds to put mileage on new prototypes and early production models to assess mechanical issues that may occur. They also carry out high mileage tests in short periods of intensive activity.

The requirement

Their clients can supply vehicles at very short notice, so no week is the same and the fleet of cars that require testing is very fluid. With over 100 drivers on their books managing driver availability was a manual task requiring a lot of phone calls and spreadsheet work.

PT&A came to BarkWeb to see if we could help automate the process of driver availability.

Identifying the solution

Our first step was to have an in-depth meeting so that we could better understand their business, and to discuss the issues that needed solving.

In the first meeting we introduced PT&A to the BarkWeb Content Management System, what was available ‘out of the box’ and identified additional functionality that was required.

Post meeting we produced an initial proposal document outlining estimated costs, once this was signed off and an agreement to proceed was given we went to our second stage of quotation to supply a detailed proposal including application design, use case modelling and UI proposals.

Delivering the solution

We used an iterative approach to delivering the solution to PT&A. This ensures that even with a detailed scope document in place we could react quickly and economically to any changes as the project was delivered.

The website was modified to allow driver registration (via a private URL) with administrative authorisation. Once a driver had logged in the system checked to see if the core data required from the driver (driven by our fluid profiling engine) was present. If not the driver has to complete the data set prior to engaging with the availability engine.

As the core issue was communicating with drivers, sorting drivers into experience levels (including familiarity with external facilities, regulatory licensing and availability) the driver is first asked for availability on a schedule set by PT&A, the system displays a touch and click friendly interface to allow the driver to quickly set their own availability:

In addition to the web interface for diver availability, PT&A have the ability via the CMS application to be able to send out email reminders and also request urgent additional availability via an SMS system.

The SMS system sends out a bespoke request and includes a simple response system. So if additional drivers are required next day an SMS can be sent to all drivers who are currently listing themselves as unavailable, they can then just reply with the word ‘yes’ to the SMS sent and this will amend their online data to make them available. PT&A can see this additional information via management reporting.

The data set for availability can be exported by PT&A administrators for internal use.

Summary

PT&A came to us with a clear objective, to be able to organise a large driver pools availability both in the medium and very short term. The system we delivered now saves them multiple hours every day of managerial work, the return on investment will not just be measured in how much time they save in labour costs but also in how well they can run their business and open up new opportunities.

We are already evolving the system into driver invoicing so that both the drivers and PT&A can manage the payroll more efficiently.