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SHUTTLEEXPRESS: FROM MANUAL TO COMPUTER-BASED IS

Your trip to Seattle is nearly over. You’ve concluded your business and had your last cup of espresso and checked out of the hotel. All that remains is to catch the shuttle van to the airport and fly home. In what is sometimes still called the Jet City, a van ride to the airport is just about the last thing you might expect to have a high-tech component.

Two years ago, you would have been correct but not today. Back then, the vans servicing customers of Seattle’s ShuttleExpress were booked and dispatched using an entirely manual, paper-based system. Dispatchers tracked vans using a chalkboard and magnets to show each van’s location on its routes. “Sometimes the magnet designating a particular van got moved, and they missed the pickup so ShuttleExpress would have to call a cab at its own expense to take the customer to the airport,” said Fred Taucher, chairman and chief executive officer of Corporate Computer, lnc.

The Seattle-based software development company replaced the chalkboard system with a computer-based system built on a network of PCs running the Microsoft Access database management package. The underlying network uses the Windows NT operating system.

The reservations system uses 12 NEC 486-based PCs networked to a Digital Equipment Aipha AXP server that has 128M-bytes of RAM and four 1.2G-byte hard disks. There are four more NEC 486 PCs for the dispatch systems that can also double as reservation systems when it gets exceptionally busy.

For ShuttleExpress, which was founded in 1987, computerizing its reservation and van dispatch system went extremely smoothly, according to company officials. Most of the system was finished in about six months, ShuttleExpress officials said.

One of the secrets to the system’s successful development and deployment process was that ShuttleExpress involved people who would have to use the system, said John Bartanen, one of the company’s dispatchers. “I find it easy to use, and we can carry at least twice as many people today as under the paper system,” said Bartanen, who had no previous computer experience when the project started. “Everybody had an opportunity to get their input into it,” said John Hagen, manager of ShuttleExpress’s guest support center.

When the customer calls the reservations number, an agent enters all of the relevant information, including a customer’s pickup location, destination, and any special instructions into the customer service database. The reservations portion of the program calculates fares based on location and generates a reservation confirmation number.