27 October, 2022

Uber-like corporate transportation: less idling, less paper, more control

Gofer — advanced platform for company car management and staff transport management.

Corporate transportation has a number of distinct traits and challenges when compared to commercial cargo fleet management. Complex approval processes, use for personal affairs, and ample idle time, to name a few. However, as opposed to the cargo transportation market the choice of solutions to address the specific needs of corporate fleets is much more scarce. 

Gofer, a business transportation management software by KloudIP, is a SaaS platform that transfers the convenience and efficiency of Uber onto the corporate car fleet enabling handy management of business rides, analysis of company car utilization, and automation of routine processes.

FYI: KloudIP has recently taken the first place in the international IoT Project of the Year competition in the “Public transport” category with its Gofer solution. This is a well deserved recognition of a technically advanced as well as goal oriented application.

Let’s see what makes Gofer such a powerful tool for companies owning corporate fleets and willing to manage them efficiently.

Gofer key benefits

  • Drastic reduction in transport expenditure — by sharing the vehicles, cutting down detours, and eliminating unauthorized usage of company vehicles for personal matters Gofer substantially optimizes the cost of car fleet operation.

  • 100% paperless — this too helped to reduce the transport expenditure as auditors can view the trip requests and view the planned and actual track to verify the validity of business trips easily and brought in transparency in terms of cross audits and compliance.

  • Automation of manual or partly manual process — previously the transport department spent a lot of time checking manual trip requests against the actual trip mileage on Wialon to calculate the mileage the drivers should be paid for. With Gofer this process becomes fully automated and eliminates human error. Push notifications on mobile and emails at each stage of a trip request replaced verbal communication via phone to clarify information about the status of a trip request, pickup locations, etc.

  • Budget control — the company can set a budget for each department and monitor the expenditure. If a department exceeds the assigned budget, its employees cannot make new trip requests. This helps companies keep the expenses within their pre-planned budget and not have unexpected overspending at the end of the month.

  • Gofer mobile app lets you do most functions of the Gofer Web from the comfort of the phone whenever and wherever needed.

Gofer interface

On top of the rich functionality, Gofer also attracts with its functional and well-thought-out design and user experience.

Here’s a general view of the main dashboard:

gofer main dashboard

Here’s the screen for creating a new vehicle request:

gofer new vehicle request

And this is the screen with the details of the completed trip:

gofer completed trip

The mobile interface is still completely functional and very handy:

gofer mobile app screens

If you like what you see and want to try it, request a Gofer free trial and evaluate the solution against your needs. 

Gofer architecture

From the technical perspective, Gofer conceptually looks like this:

gofer architecture scheme

As seen from the scheme above, flespi serves as a middleman between the modules of the Gofer platform, telematics hardware used in the customers’ fleets, and the fleet management platforms.

  • Gofer relies on the flespi MQTT broker to establish fast and reliable communication.

  • Gofer uses flespi developer-friendly API to consume the data from the flespi platform.

  • Flespi is also used to send commands to manage versatile GPS trackers and configure telematics device parameters according to the needs of the end-user application. In the currently implemented project, Concox and Xirgo devices are installed.

  • Users get real-time location data from thousands of vehicles in their application interface with negligible delay.

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As a result of its partnership with flespi, KloudIP managed to release the Gofer solution to the product faster, cut down its infrastructure and development resources, got peace of mind relying on the flespi telematics expertise in seamlessly handling incoming data from thousands of tracking devices, and focused on delivering the ultimate value to the customer.

At the same time, the end users of the Gofer platform got a high-performance, high-availability, future-proof product designed based on the latest technologies.