Saving 100 Man Hours a Month on Manual Transport Planning

SWAT’s technology has allowed our employees that manage transport to rest on nights and weekends and focus on their work. It’s reduced the work required versus our previous manual process that had employees waiting for hours for vans and arriving very late.

- Alex Gomez, Vice President for people and culture at KMC Solutions

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The Challenge

When COVID-19 hit, KMC Solutions (KMC) quickly realised that it needed to broaden its staff shuttle services.  While they previously provided connections to public transportation nodes, this needed to be expanded to close-to-door services.  KMC began to run its close-to-door shuttles manually. Everyday, 2 to 3 employees would collect email responses and send off a list at the end of the day to their drivers. 

Riders had to send the drivers directions to their pick-up points if the drivers were having difficulty getting there. To facilitate the transport, our client would advise members to gather together at a nearby pick-up location to make it easier for the drivers.  Many calls back and forth among coordinators, drivers and passengers were needed to allow it to run at all.

Due to the manual nature of the work, the client shuttle arrangements were limited to only a few passengers at a time. In addition, to ensure rider safety amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, the social distancing within the vehicles was also being observed, adding to the complexity of the job. 

It took each staff coordinating the transport 2 hours on average to collate and send off the requests to the drivers. Manually collecting ride requests every night was not only very tedious for the select staff to do, it was also done outside their work hours and on weekends due to a cut-off time. 

The Solution

SWAT Mobility’s Just In Time solution automates the manual planning that was done previously.  Several shift timings for home-to-work and work-to-home were set up. Passengers use the SWATBiz App to book their ride when they need it, based on either a desired departure time, or arrival time.

As an example, in the home-to-work case, our algorithm takes the requested pick up locations of all passengers and calculates the optimal stops and routes. This takes just minutes, and the routes and pick up points get sent to drivers and passengers. Drivers can easily follow the navigation directions to the correct locations.

Service levels like less than 500m walking distance, or maximum journey times, can be set by the client. Passengers can use the SWATBiz app to track their vehicle arrival time to the pick up point with real-time GPS updates.  When boarding their assigned vehicle, the driver can verify the correct passenger through a unique code that is generated for the passenger for that ride. 

With SWAT Mobility’s solution, KMC has made transport available to over 100 people a month, a far cry from the few they could provide for daily previously. In addition, there are also over 2,000 registered pickup points available to book for. Thomas Cragg, Vice President of Sales, KMC Solutions, adds

These numbers would’ve been impossible to reach if we were still doing this manually.

The data available from the SWAT Mobility usage also helps KMC Solutions strategize on which areas in the cities more pick-ups should be placed in as it shows where the general population our riders are coming from, thus improving service. 

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