Company: Serco
The extremely complex logistics behind the redistribution effort for 6,000 bikes around 400 docking stations involving over 10,000 docking points, with enormous ebbs and flows of demand over the course of each day, is a huge challenge. Over the first six months of operation, Barclays Cycle Hire members pedalled the equivalent of ‘13 times the distance to the moon and back’ – over 10 million kilometres in 2.5 million journeys. Production Modelling have been working in conjunction with the service provider, Serco, to highlight the best methods of managing the redistribution of bikes, both now and as the scheme expands – with amazing results.
The Challenge - Moving Complexity Away From The Point Of Delivery
It is important to understand the vast scale of the operation. Fifteen per cent of the demand during each day takes place over just one hour, between 8.00 am and 9.00 am, involving around 3,000 cycle hires. A large proportion of this activity is generated by commuters who are arriving at mainline rail stations. With an average hire time of 20 minutes, each bike is re-docked across a extremely wide area, particularly concentrated in the city. In order to maintain high customer service standards, these cycles have to be redistributed to the high volume demand locations as fast as possible. At the end of the working day, the flow reverses and commuters making up the majority of users, expect availability of bikes close to their workplace. All this activity is carried out against stringent Key Performance Indicators which are designed to allow the hire experience to be as simple and as efficient as possible for members.
Modelling and Simulation
Graham Bright, Customer Experience Manager at Serco, joined the project in April 2010 and quickly identified the role that planning, modelling and simulation software systems could perform in making informed decisions. A highly detailed tender document was prepared and Production Modelling’s Service Model simulation software was chosen from a shortlist of three systems. According to Graham, the proposal from Production Modelling demonstrated the best functionality and most cost effective performance. The truly unique aspect, though, was an extra software solution, Orchestrate, that takes the user beyond simulation into visualisation.
Service Model assists Serco in working out the efficiency of their redistribution vehicle operation, while Orchestrate enables them to observe the reasons why various areas are performing differently. They can operate ‘what if’ scenarios which are based on validated data.
The system also enables them to feed a real day’s data to simulations, including the quantities and types of redistribution vehicles, where they had been allocated, and the various tasks assigned to them. Managers can then observe performance in terms of the amount of traffic at docking stations, running simulations with data they know they can trust. From there, it is easy to extrapolate the implications of, say, a 25,000 or a 30,000 hire day. Read more…….
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