IVU.suite at BOGG

Initial situation

Almost 19,000 passengers use the Busbetrieb Olten Gösgen Gäu (BOGG) bus service every day. This is an indispensable service in the Olten region that connects all of the surrounding smaller towns. To make sure that its passengers get to their destination every day, BOGG has relied on the IVU.suite planning products for its timetable planning, run scheduling and duty scheduling since 2004.

Flexibility is increasingly important for the bus company. The integrated personnel dispatch function allows BOGG to cater for the various needs of its employees. But in order to stay competitive, BOGG was on the lookout for a time-saving planning solution.

Objectives

BOGG’s aim was to optimise staff rostering in line with employee needs and to automate the planning process. Individual employee requests played an important role here. Duty allocation needed to comply with the provisions of the Working Hours Act and take into account internal regulations as well as the employees’ depot affiliation and route knowledge. In addition, employee rotas needed to be published several months in advance. BOGG wanted to achieve a time saving of at least 50 percent for the task of staff rostering.

An integrated employee portal is the central interface for communication between drivers and dispatchers. Employees are informed of their duties via the portal, and they can use it to access up-to-date information – from holiday approvals to short-notice duty modifications. As well as individual preferences, staff can also specify duty and day-off requests that are saved directly in the system and taken into account by the optimisation function. Dispatch managers can see immediately whether an employee request is viable – and can modify the result directly in cases of doubt.

Complex duty and payroll rules can be stored and amended directly in IVU.crew thanks to the rule editor. They are therefore available to APD for all calculations. This ensures fully compliant rostering.

Outcome

The automatic personnel dispatch function of IVU.crew far exceeded the time saving for the planning process of 50 percent that BOGG originally envisaged: A time gain of 80 percent was achieved overall. Instead of the usual ten days, the dispatch managers can now create the monthly deployment schedule in just two days.

The employees have also benefited from this. APD has meant a very high level of request approval: More than 400 employee requests were submitted via the employee portal in the first month after the introduction. The dispatch managers were able to approve 95 percent of these requests thanks to APD.

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