Wong Oi Mei, vice president, Information Technology, Taxi Business, for ComfortDelGro
The successful implementation of the ITSM—also known as ‘Escalade’—is credited with having enabled ComfortDelGro to maintain their pole position in Singapore as a market leader in call bookings, with a 95 per cent share.
Escalade is claimed to be the world’s largest GPRS-based taxi booking and dispatch system. ComfortDelGro is the world’s second largest public listed passenger land transport company with a fleet of more than 39,100 vehicles. Its businesses include bus, taxi, rail, car rental and leasing, automotive engineering and maintenance services, plus more.
ComfortDelGro also has operations in China, the UK, Ireland, Australia, Vietnam and Malaysia. Currently, some 38 per cent of the group's revenue comes from overseas investments.
There are two taxi companies under the ComfortDelGro Group—Comfort Transportation ('Comfort' for short) and CityCab. All ComfortDelGro taxis have been operating on the ITMS since October 2007.
Wireless Communication
Built on a J2EE enterprise architecture, Escalade communicates between wireless terminals in the organisation’s 15,000 taxis and the backend system using a GPRS-GSM network. It intelligently matches taxi availability with customer demands, and enhances fleet optimisation. The system is deployed based on various innovative technologies such as GPRS, GPS, text-to-speech, voice streaming and intelligent algorithms.
The taxi booking and despatch system wirelessly connects taxis using the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology via the in-vehicle Mobile Data Terminals (MDTs).
ComfortDelGro Taxi Business adopted the Rational Unified Process (RUP) iterative software development approach, based on the Struts and J2EE framework. They believe Escalade is likely the first large scale taxi booking and despatch system successfully implemented using J2EE architecture.
The in-vehicle devices enhance the productivity and effectiveness of driver operations and customer service. They are manufactured by InfoWave, an associated company of STEE InfoComm, and have been specially designed with bigger and brighter seven-inch TFT (thin film transistor) glare-resistant touch-screen displays for easy viewing by the taxi drivers. Coupled with digitised maps and real-time information, the new system enables drivers to locate passengers more easily and quickly.
ComfortDelGro says the intelligence built in the despatch algorithm is able to facilitate increase in taxi supply during peak hours where free taxis are limited. Normally, they say, jobs are offered to free taxis. When there are no free taxis, the system offers jobs to taxis about to drop off a customer (soon-to-free taxis), or to busy taxis heading towards the customer location.
Tech street directory
The Geographical Information System (GIS) serves as a street directory for cabbies to refer to when they have difficulties locating unfamiliar pick-up points. For example, the map is able to pinpoint the exact location of a customer's pick-up point. The map is always positioned in the direction in which the taxi is moving, for easy navigation. Cabbies can use the touchscreen keyboard to key in the destination and the map will display the general route to take.
The ITSM implementation was accomplished within two years in what the cab group calls ‘a win-win partnership between ST Electronics and ComfortDelGro’.
ST Electronics, the electronics arm of Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering), won the contract through its subsidiary, ST Electronics (Info-Comm Systems)—STEE-InfoComm.
The vice president, Information Technology, Taxi Business, for ComfortDelGro, Wong Oi Mei, said ST Electronics had a proven track record in the development of despatch systems, plus the capability to deliver a cost-effective IT solution that met the company’s requirements.
The project was a collaboration between ComfortDelGro Taxi Business and STEE-Infocomm teams. The ITMS is jointly designed by the two teams, and developed and implemented by STEE-Infocomm. At its peak, the project involved about 20 technical resources from both teams plus ComfortDelGro Taxi Business user stakeholders.
A steering committee, comprising senior management from STEE-Infocomm and ComfortDelGro, was formed to provide the overall direction and authority for the implementation of the project.
ST Electronics (Info-Comm Systems) was the system integrator for the ITMS, Hewlett-Packard Singapore was system integrator for the call centre telephony system, and the Singapore Land Authority was the licensor of the Singapore map data used.
Geo Millenium System was the developer for the GIS, MavenLab System developed the SMS engine and other products involved included Weblogic, Jboss, Oracle and SqlServer.
Escalade’s customer-centric features allow ComfortDelgro to treat repeated customers differently for their loyalty, an innovative taxi service delivery from booking to billing that has given them a competitive edge.
Wong said that ComfortDelgro implemented business intelligence by “identifying our frequent booking customers and giving them priority in taxi booking”.
“BI plays an important role in that it helps us identify specific groups of customers so that we can tailor our taxi services to their needs.”
Broader ROI
She said that Escalade’s ROI was not limited to financial measurement.
“Instead, our investment strategy was to use the system to gain competitive edge to retain our cabbies and expand our revenue fleet size,” Wong said. “We use the booking system to secure as many booking jobs as possible for our cabbies, and these translate into fares for our drivers and therefore, higher income.”
ComfortDelGro has also introduced multiple cashless payment modes such as credit-debit cards, corporate cards, eVouchers and NETS for passengers short of hard cash.
“This means passengers, who prefer cashless payments such as NETS, will continue to make our taxis a preferred choice,” Wong said. “The number of cashless payments made on our taxis averages about 25,000 per day. In all, a total of S$134 (US$88) million in fares were collected by cabbies from cashless transactions last year.”
This vice president, information technology said that information technology has always played an important role in driving business excellence.
“ITMS had successfully transformed the taxi booking and despatch landscape to achieve new levels in customer service as well as driver productivity,” Wong said.
“It was a challenging but exciting project and we are proud to have played a role in making it happen. Winning this CIO 2009 award is a further testimony of the hard work and commitment put in by our team and a motivation to continuously innovate and go for the next milestone.”
Judge impressed
One of the CIO 2009 award judges, Waleed Hanafi, SVP and CIO of the Global Refund Group, said he was impressed by the Escalade system. “They have done a good job of making the transition from proprietary networking to GPRS, and enhanced the system beyond anything that was dreamed of when it was first launched,” said Hanafi. “Booking a taxi in Singapore is one of the easiest experiences to be had.”
ComfortDeGro can definitely be fairly described as a ‘heavy user of technology’ that leverages technology to meet business needs. “For example,” said Wong, “we have deployed proven technologies such as Global Positioning System (GPS), text-to-speech (TTS) and interactive voice response (IVR), address prediction and SMS to make taxi booking a hassle-free experience for commuters.
“We also have a comprehensive fleet management system that enables us to credit cashless transactions within 48 hours and a comprehensive billing system that provides customer with detailed trip information such as pick up and drop off points for even street hail.”
Future plans
Wong said ComfortDelGro has plans to further leverage their GPRS-GSM network over the next few years.
“We will continue to exploit technology to improve customer taxi booking and on-board payment experience, as well as providing niche transport solutions for target customers,” she said.
“We are exploring services such as demand/supply forecasting to improve the matching of a taxi to customer booking, location-based services and expanding cashless payment modes on board our taxis, such as accepting hotel cards so that tourists can charge their taxi trips to their hotel bill.
“The Singapore land transport industry is ever changing and we need to constantly innovate to stay ahead of competition,” Wong said. “There is always the next service level to achieve, the next idea and solution to implement. While this is all challenging, there is great satisfaction in being able to anticipate our operations, customers and drivers needs and have solutions in hand to meet them.”
As to lessons learned from the Escalade project, Wong said: “It was important to keep an open channel of communication between end users and IT during the course of project implementation.
“Feedback by end users is extremely important to balance technical and operation perspectives and provide greater insights as to whether certain solutions work,” she said. “We also need to exercise flexibility in ensuring issues are tackled head on with the right objectives in mind.”
