Book & Move: Our solution for humanitarian vehicle carpooling
14 August 2024 - Humanitarian & Key accounts
14 August 2024 - Humanitarian & Key accounts
In a context where efficiency and sustainability are paramount, humanitarian organizations are under increasing pressure to optimize their resources. The logistical challenges of transporting aid in crisis zones are crucial, often requiring rapid deployment of convoys while minimizing costs and environmental impact.
Vehicle sharing has been shown to reduce procurement, rental, and operational costs by up to 30%, cut CO2 emissions and fleet-related waste by over 25%, and improve public health by reducing air pollutants and noise.
As part of its HUMANAV platform, CLS has created an innovative solution to this problem with its “Book & Move” functionality. This integrated tool allows aid agencies to pool, share, and optimize their transport resources, ensuring a safe, flexible, and readily available fleet for quick field interventions.
Book & Move is a comprehensive e-booking app designed to streamline the transport logistics for humanitarian missions. Through the Book & Move app, agents can easily indicate their transport needs for upcoming missions, allowing dispatchers to see all transport requests, available vehicles, and drivers in real time. Dispatchers can efficiently match these requests to drivers’ schedules, organize car-sharing, and send notifications and mission orders directly to drivers. Fleet managers and headquarters can measure, control, and adjust operational costs, enhancing the overall efficiency of transport management. With the Book & Move app, trips are safer and better supervised, missions are meticulously planned and optimized, overall costs are reduced, and vehicles no longer leave half-full.
Carpooling through Book & Move increases vehicle occupancy rates, reducing unnecessary trips and maximizing vehicle utilization. This allows agencies to make unused fleet capacity available to other agencies, keeping money spent on transportation within the UN family instead of being spent on private taxis. Consequently, agencies only pay for transportation when they need it, ensuring cost-effective and resource-efficient operations.
In 2021, CLS equipped NGOs in Beirut with the Book & Move solution to optimize their convoys, in an inter-agency service pool solution, designed at a country level. CLS Book & Move single agency users using the solution were able to offer to share vehicle at country level, to other agencies. After tailored developments, we had successful numbers on this approach: More than 15 000 trips registered, more than 600 passengers have requested transports through the app, 11 UN agencies were enrolled in this Lebanon project.
In this project, we estimate savings of approximately $119 000 across all agencies for the first 15 months of use.
To further enhance its utility and user experience, CLS has recently enriched the Book & Move application with several new features. Users can now define departure and arrival points using GPS coordinates, making the creation of transportation requests more straightforward and precise. The introduction of a “Favorite Places” feature allows users to quickly plan their transport needs by selecting frequently used locations, streamlining the booking process. Additionally, trip reports have been improved to include a comprehensive list of upcoming checkpoints, enabling better journey anticipation and planning. These enhancements collectively contribute to a more efficient and user-friendly experience, making the Book & Move application an even more valuable tool for humanitarian operations.
With these updates, CLS continues to perfect its solutions for the day-to-day support and optimization of NGO and humanitarian transport solutions, enabling aid agencies to respond swiftly and effectively in crisis situations while optimizing their resources and minimizing environmental impact.