Jönköping Länstrafik AB

The Organization

Jönköping Länstrafik AB (JLT) manages the demand response service covering leisure trips, work trips, school trips and non-emergency medical trips in the southern Swedish county, Jönköping Län. The service includes demand response service and patient transport.

Business Problem

Autumn 2000 the County Council, which is responsible for patient transport together with the 13 municipalities, which are responsible for the demand response service in Jönköping Län, decided that future passenger transport and demand response service should be co-ordinated and that bookings should take place in one central booking centre. The at that time booking centers had to be moved from the booking centres at Taxi to a new established central booking centre. Jönköpings Länstrafik was put in charge of administration and operation of the new service and booking centre.

At the same time it was decided to purchase a new and modern computer system. To achieve coordinated planning, it was necessary to do all the planning in one and the same computer system. The system should be able to handle all functions from customer registration, certification, booking of trips, coordination and dispatch to the final settlement with the operators. The objective was to achieve a more efficient service and a better customer service and in the long term permit integration with fixed route transport.

The Solution

After a thorough evaluation of computer systems and an EU tender Jönköping Länstrafik chose to buy Trapeze Pass. The system was installed during 2002 og 2003 and went live in one municipality at a time.

Results

Today the booking centre has 10 full-time em­ployees and 4 part-time employees who work with booking, 9 employees work with planning and dispatching and 4 are hourly paid They work every 4th weekend and fill in during illness. A booker typically handles 100-120 calls a day, and the main part of the calls are bookings.

The booker also handles other things, such as answering calls about delays or contacting the vehicles when neccesary. A booker can receive 25 to 30 calls per hour, but usually an average of 20 calls are handled. The opening hours of the booking centre are from 5.30 AM to midnight from Monday to Thursday, from 5.30 AM to 2AM Friday and from 7 AM to 2 AM in the weekends. After hours, Jönköping Län has an agreement with SOS regarding emergency transport.

“Today we have a system which gives us a good coordinated service” says Anna-Karin Malm, head of the booking centre. “Our rules state that patient transport and demand response trips outside your own municipality has to be booked the day before at 4:00 pm at the latest, whereas demand response trips can be booked on the same day. About 60% of the bookings concern same day trips and half of these trips are booked short time before execution, which often is only an hour before. Our booking staff is allowed to look for solutions in the range of +/- 30 minutes from the wished time. If we have agreed on a specific time with the customer, it must be kept with -5 / + 10 minutes. Otherwise it is to be considered a delay. We have fine results regarding schedule adherence. Only 1% of the trips have a delay on more than 30 minutes, and just 4% have a delay on more than 10 minutes. A batch planning is run every ½ and 1 ½ hour and this has a great effect on planning efficiency.”

The Bottom Line

“The system has given us obvious advantages,” Anna-Karin Malm continues. “We can retrieve a great deal of information from the system, we can monitor the trips, and the municipalities and the county can draw reports and statistics. We know for example precisely how many kilometres is actualy run for each booked kilometer, we know that 53% of all trips are coordinated, and that the coordinated kilometres amount to 44%. The accurate data are veryimportant for the settlement we make with the operators. Today we use reverse invoicing, which means that we pay for the actual kilometres driven, and that is a great advantage for us.”

For futher information please contact: Anna-Karin Malm on phone number: 0046 36 39 55 00 or Christian Erikstrup, Trapeze Group Europe
Tel: 0045 87 44 16 00