Q1. What is the Capricornia Car Pool System?
Ans. Capricornia car pool system is a Fleet management service provider which provides the Central QueenslandUniversity with hired cars that are provided to the people of the University mostly for Official Tours. The Car pool system had 30 cars across its campuses in Gladstone, Mackay and Rock Hampton for the Central Queensland University. The Car pool currently consists of two types of vehicles these are the sedans and the station wagons. They can be hired for a limited time period the maximum being 2 weeks and the minimum being 1 hour at any given time.
The best part about this service is that a person can book a car just by call the facilities management division or even by sending them an E-mail. The people who book a cab even knows in advance what they will be charged and apart from this they can also opt for extra services such as roof-rack or trailers just at an extra charge.
So a person can just book a cab from them and relax while he is traveling
Q2 What are the current problems with the Capricornia Car Pool System?
Ans.
The current problems with the Capricornia car pool system are as follows.
First of all since every thing is done manually by the booking clerk there are high possibilities that when the data is copied from the log book of the driver to the log book of the management some writing errors might occur.
Secondly manual operations can slow down the booking process considerably as every thing is done on paper which takes a lot of time and often creates confusion and as all bookings are done on paper some are not finalized when a car can not be tracked for the lack of a tracking system installed in the cars. Also the papers containing the booking are sometimes misplaced by the booking clerk.
The maintenance of these cars is a big problem as it is a job of a single person to insure every car is properly serviced and is in a working condition.
There is a clear communication gap between the management and the booking clerks as no information is provided to the management about how many cars are available and in working condition.
Q3 What information do you need to find out about the Capricornia Car Pool System to develop a detailed understanding of the current system?
Ans
The information that we needed to collect for a detailed understanding of the Capricornia car pool system include the What does it do, Knowledge of how it works, Were does the problem arise, What actually is the main problem and the areas of improvement, What do we need to improve the services of the car pool system and the positives and the negatives of using the services of Fleet Management system and the steps needed to improve the service.
The car pool system allows a person of the university to easily book a cab from the fleet management people for there official purpose from the university without having to call a cab using other resources which can take more time. Since the service is provided by within the university it is more reliable than others.
The work of the car pool system involves a set of people some who make booking and some who provide cabs and confirm bookings but since they operate manually it is hard to keep track of the work they have to do.
There is no proper tracking system available with the car pool system people so that they can identify were the cabs are when making a booking and to figure out whether it the car needs a service or we need to replace the car altogether.
It is here where the problem arises sometimes there can be a communication gap between the booking clerk and the receptionist and the one who suffers because of this is the person who wanted to make a booking. The communication gap between the management and the fleet management people makes sure that the management does not know where the problem lies “Is it the number of cars or something else”.
The steps I think are needed for improvement include a need for a software that can take and save all information online so that the information can be tracked by the person who needs to make a booking or by the booking clerk who has to finalize the booking and by the management so that they can ask for increase in the fleet when needed. A proper tracking system should be installed in all the cars so that there movements are tracked when they are on a tour.
