CC by-sa 2.0 by Frerieke on flickr.com

With thousands joining the throng of public transport commuters in 2011, WhereisMyTransport is poised to make a significant impact on the provision of efficient, reliable public transport services in South Africa. Founded in January 2007, five University of Cape Town Information Systems Honours graduates developed their Honours research into a fully-fledged business that has been recognized locally and internationally for its excellence and innovation.

What is WhereIsMyTransport?
Fusing their technology and business skills, the team built the WhereIsMyTransport platform that is the foundation for a “modern and fully-integrated transportation infrastructure system.” It provides transport companies with tracking and scheduling control over their vehicles; reporting facilities; live monitoring and verification of vehicles, drivers, routes and passengers. From a consumer-perspective, the platform provides real-time services that keep them up to date with the arrival and departure times, routes and schedule information of their transport, via their mobile phones or the web. WhereIsMyTransport also provides a card-based ticketing technology so that commuters can engage in ‘cash-less’ transactions for their transport.

The WhereIsMyTransport platform has been structured to be able to implement different packages, depending on the transport service required, for example, WhereIsMyShuttle, WhereIsMyBus, WhereIsMyTaxi, and WhereIsMyTrain, thus making it highly flexible within the sector.

“The project is well established and is now at it’s it final ‘project’ hurdle – successfully making it into the market. The team’s approach has erred on the side of caution, making sure of the product’s stability before taking it to market. This has been done through continuous testing, using an extensive user base, in order to ensure its market relevancy,” explained Devin de Vries, CEO of WhereIsMyTransport.

Piloting the product
After an intensive study of the local transport industry and with a stint in Europe to understand sophisticated transport systems, the team produced a proof of concept, followed by a three-month WhereIsMyBus pilot in 2008. Built in collaboration with Golden Arrow Bus Services and Sibanye, this pilot was implemented on two busses, and allowed passengers to request the location and arrival time of their busses via a simple SMS or a graphical interface. They could also access detailed information, such as the next bus at their stop on the route of their choice.

The WhereIsMy Bus pilot resulted in insightful ‘lessons learned’ which de Vries shared with us:

“Often how the product creators envision a product to be used is not actually how it is actually used in practice. This was encountered when the SMS service was made public. In certain cases, instead of SMS-ing a structured query as indicated on the fliers, students would rather send complaints and requests to the SMS line. Another example of this is that the typical day of the routing and scheduling officer was not as simple as the software first envisaged, and often the software had to be manipulated in unexpected ways. We learned that the system needed to account for the emotions and dynamics of people.”

The same concept applied to those who were operating to provide the transport service. The WhereIsMyTransport team thought that what would motivate operating officers would be increased data integrity, but it turned out that what was most appealing was the ability to save time and decrease mundane tasks. (more…)