500Cars

About 500Cars

500Cars is an executive car chauffeur service who offers high quality cars for business travellers. They pride themselves on providing the best quality service at affordable prices. All of their drivers have to meet stringent requirements before they are employed, including criminal history checks and full medicals.

They offer three types of cars; executive, taxis and mini buses. The executive cars are used for special occasions, airport pick ups/drop offs, theatre trips etc. The drivers are well dressed, polite and dependable. The cars are modern, clean and high tech - you can even chose to order a car with a high speed internet connection to use during a business trip.

The Problem

The old website offered an online registration service through which a customer can book a car in advance. However, the booking process was not particularly user friendly so customers preferred to send email bookings instead. There was also little incentive to use the online booking form as it did not provide them with any additional functionality. When a booking order is placed (via any method), the administration team transfers the information to their booking system in the office.

Emails come from repeat visitors but are time intensive to transfer to the booking system and there is great value in converting these email bookings to web bookings. The emails sometimes do not contain the correct information and so needs to be bounced back - creating admin overheads, whereas an online booking system will gather all required information.

Requirements

Many of the bookings are made by office secretaries and Personal Assistants and so we were required to rebuild the online booking system with the following goals:

• Encourage users to book online - This gives 500Cars significant time saving and therefore improves efficiency.
• Make booking a journey quick and easy - Making the process of booking a taxi simple leads to a more pleasurable user experience and a greater chance they will use the system again.
• Allow users to rebook previous journeys - By giving users these added features, they would be encouraged to come back to use 500Cars whenever they needed transport.
• Give users access to past journeys and invoices - Meaning less administration for the back office team.
• Take payment on account or credit card - Speeding up the payment process when users most need the time (at the end of the journey) encourages them to come back and use their services again.

The Solution

Our solution consisted of several stages as follows:

Business analysis
In order to thoroughly understand the exact requirements, we conducted an in-depth business analysis. This included the following:

• Analysing the business process
• Understanding the core requirements
• Understanding the business goals

By conducting a business analysis we could be sure that we fully understood the requirements and how our solution would fit into their business. It is important to provide a solution that fits within the business process or it will become a burden and a waste of money.

Project management
With such a complicated process, it was important to manage the project successfully in order to produce something that works well for the client and comes within budget. Project management included:

• Mapping the user process
• Managing content delivery
• Managing the budget and scope creep
• Change management to ensure that the implementation of a new business process is accepted and understood by all employees

Project management is one of the most important factors in delivering a successful project.

Application development
The final stage to the project was to produce the online application through a use of the following technologies:

• ASP.NET
• Microsoft SQL Server
• JavaScript