VHD Europenet - logistic control centre
VHD Europenet is a company specialised in telephone services for truck drivers who have trouble with their truck on the road. For locating service stations and drivers, VHD Europenet is now using a system built by Geodan, which represents a considerable gain of time.
Whenever a truck driver has technical problems anywhere in Europe, he can call VHD Europenet in Holten, the Netherlands. This call centre is manned by four to sixteen persons. Their task is to locate the driver’s position as quickly as possible and find the nearest service station that can solve the driver’s problem. Every day, they receive between 50 and, on peak days, 200 phone calls from drivers. The objective is to help them as fast as possible.
From analogue to digital
For finding the drivers and service stations, VHD Europenet had maps hanging all over its walls and European street and road maps spread all over the tables. For speeding up this search task, a MapInfo application was implemented, in which the Roadnet roads and locations are used to speed up the search. As soon as the driver has been located, the 5 nearest service stations are automatically displayed, as well as the opening hours, telephone numbers and areas of specialisation.
Substantial gain of time
Once operational, it was clear that the help desk employees at VHD Europenet gained approximately 5 to 8 minutes per incident when using the new system. Last year, VHD Europenet dealt with 40,000 incidents. Taking a time gain of 5 minutes per incident as the starting point, the GIS can result in a total time gain of more than 3,000 hours, that is, around 400 days per year.
MapInfo
VHD Europenet uses MapInfo technology:
- The desktop system MapInfo professional was selected. With MapBasic, an application was developed so the system would be very user-friendly and could be used by new people with a minimum explanation.
