ACS International Schools

Background

ACS International Schools first contacted us here at Revelation late in 2013 regarding fitting tracking devices to their contractors’ fleet of school buses, it was to be on a trial Pay AS You Go tracking basis for one of their 3 schools. The trial period went well with us here at Revelation building a full bespoke platform and features to streamline the fleet managers day to day running of the buses.

Challenge

The Fleet Manager Mick then approached us with an issue he encounters on a daily basis that our Revelation Telematics system could help to overcome. This challenge ACS came to us with was that on the bus routes bringing the numerous school children from all over London we needed to prove that the bus had been to each house at a certain time and waited for the minimum of 2 minutes which is the school policy. If the Fleet Manager or school staff could not supply proof of this then it would cost them money to get the child to school and in a penalty.

Solution

As ACS International Schools use 5,000+ Apple products exclusively, our first task was to create ACS a fully mobile and Apple friendly platform as our existing Silverlight user interface works with all desktops and laptops but not phones or tablets, this lead us to a full rewrite of the site in HTML5.

To help to counteract this penalty and taxi charge and give the school proof that their buses were doing their job as instructed, Revelation created a bespoke application which we called “Point Of Interest Timetable”. This means that all the Fleet Manager would have to do in use our simple point of interest creator on their account with each POI’s postcode.

Our Revelation Telematics system will then automatically create a small geofence around each location so as the vehicle tracker in each bus passes into the geofence it gets a time and date stamp of arrived, as it leaves the geofence the time and date is also collected for departure. All this data is then collated into a bus like timetable for ease of use by the Fleet Manager and the staff going back up to 2 weeks.

ACS International Schools also trialled a Quartix system by way of a comparison, they found it to be very basic and did not meet their needs or requirements which was not only down to the slow update times as to be able to achieve a similar result to our POI Timetable, the drivers of the buses would have to switch the ignition off at each stop.

Revelation is the first telematics service that we know of to create such a system of which many companies in varying sectors, from taxi firms to couriers, will benefit hugely from.

ACS International Schools have now rolled the Revelation system out to their entire 110+ fleet of vehicles across all their schools in the UK with the same features that we developed around their needs. Revelation beat both Quartix and Fleetmatics to be awarded the contract due to numerous reasons but value for money and our feature rich system being key.