About Texas Taxi
Texas Taxi is the premier taxi service in the Greater Houston Area and the parent company of Yellow Cab and Fiesta Cabs. Texas Taxi is a 24-hour operation that prides itself on having the largest, most modern fleet, which features clean and comfortable sedans and minivans.
The Problem
Texas Taxi has built its reputation on having clean, comfortable, and well-maintained vehicles, giving each passenger peace of mind with the knowledge that they will be able to arrive at their location safely and punctually. In order to uphold this standard, taxi cabs are regularly inspected for new damage, existing issues, and routine maintenance needs. Historically, Texas Taxi has been dependent on an antiquated process that required inspectors to record their findings on a piece of paper.
This process is cumbersome, inefficient, and expensive due to:
- Disconnected record keeping for historical and new issues with vehicles
- Inaccurate or error-prone communication due to inconsistent or illegible handwriting
- Larger costs that need to be absorbed due to issues that go untracked
- Lack of accountability for the completion of inspection activities
- Lack of a workflow that ensures that discrepancies are identified and reported
The Solution
In order to address these challenges, Texas Taxi worked with Knomatic to mobilize their vehicle inspection process. With Knomatic’s Mobile Studio, Texas Taxi was able to address these issues in under three weeks.
How the Mobile Inspection Process works:
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When a cab driver leaves their car at the shop, an inspector can scan the bar code or do a simple search to look up a vehicle’s history.
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Once they have reviewed the history, the inspector can create a new inspection for the vehicle. Access to the vehicle's history allows the shop to quickly compare the current state of the car to its previous state from the last visit.
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When the inspection is submitted, the patent-pending Knomatic Workflow Engine triggers notifications to the cashier’s department as well as other Texas Taxi employees, alerting them to the charges that need to be applied to the driver’s account.
The Results
Texas Taxi has realized many benefits by implementing a mobile inspection process using Knomatic, including increased revenue, reduced costs, and improved efficiencies.
Revenue
- Increased revenue by capturing additional charges that otherwise would have been unnoticed or captured as incurred expenses.
- Increased revenue by way of happier customers. There is no ambiguity in terms of why certain charges were applied, as everything has been documented and signed off on.
Cost Efficiencies
- By eliminating paper slips, Texas Taxi reduced their storage and printing costs.
- Texas Taxi was able to significantly reduce non-productive time by eliminating the need to manage paper forms.
Operational Efficiencies
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Reduction of non-productive work, such as manually walking over to the cashier department to hand over pieces of paper.
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Reduction in the errors or need for repeated communication caused by poor handwriting on paper forms.
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Increased data accuracy allows for quick integration of data with business workflows and direct routing of information to the appropriate personnel.
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Increased accountability of inspectors through the use of contextual date time and user ID stamping on digital forms.
Change Management
The Knomatic platform not only provided the aforementioned benefits, but also played a significant role in facilitating change management. As with any change management process, digitization of a paper-based process typically faces resistance to change. However, by using the Knomatic Studio, Texas Taxi was able to involve end users (e.g. inspectors) throughout the app creation process, thus instilling a sense of ownership in the end users and mitigating risk, as the solution closely matched their day-to-day needs. Inspectors are able to continuously provide feedback and recommendations, which are incorporated into the application by Texas Taxi without the need for an engineering team.
