PATS

The Problem

The Passenger and Transport Services department of Leicester City Council, were looking for a system that could accurately record all the data associated with the planning, organising, and recording these journeys.

The Solution

As the system would only be used in-house, due to the sensitive nature of much of the data, we chose a Windows Desktop application that was accessible by only privileged staff members. The system would run on Leicester City Council’s internal network and the data would be stored on their servers, to ensure no unauthorized access.

Key Features

This case study will concentrate and outline the more specialised aspects of the software, rather than detail the generic aspect common to most business software.

Operational Calendars

Throughout the year different calendars can be added for different reasons, not all activities within any given year, will necessarily run for the same time period or have the same operational days. For example, school years normally start in September and end in August; have various holidays in-between and are rarely open at weekends. Whereas, an adult day center may be open at weekends and could use January to December as their yearly period. To make setting up these calendars easy they were laid out in visual form with the ability to click on a day to turn its’ operational status on/off.

The Ability to Bulk Add Orders

Due to the nature of the work many of the customers’ journeys, will start or end in same location. So, we developed a way to bulk add customers to orders, who have a common collection or drop-off point.

Drag and Drop Allocations

To speed up the allocation of orders to the 3 different ‘fulfilled by’ types: Taxi; In House or Parent, we provided a drag and drop interface where orders could be easily allocated.

Routing Overview

Once orders are allocated, they show on the routing view. The left-hand side of the routing screen shows the orders with routes showing on the right-hand side. To assign an order to a route, users can drag the order and drop it onto the route. Routes can be printed as a PDF at any stage.