As evidenced by Avail’s background, our staff has been working in the trenches and listening to the needs for technology within transit organizations since 1992. Starting in 1999, Avail specifically focused our attentions on the needs of the operators with 250 vehicles or less, and we have heard what you had to say LOUD AND CLEAR!
Transit operators in Avail’s target market have just as much need for technology as those running 1,000 vehicles or more. The difference is that many of their needs aren’t the same. The other thing that isn’t the same is the internal resources that these operators have available from a technical, manpower and even funding prospective.
Because of this, these users are looking for technology that while being easy to use, understand and maintain, still provides them with all of the features and functionality required to truly provide the cost payback benefit which justifies their adoption.
Furthermore, since these properties do not have the internal resources for dedicating staff focused on nothing but managing technology, they also need a solution that will allow them to grow and add new features and functionalities in the future without being tied to a proprietary dinosaur that forces them to limit their options.
Understanding this need Avail has developed an entire suite of products that have been designed from the bottom up as a non proprietary open architecture system that fully embraces the evolving TCIP standards for interoperability between different vendors’ products. This product suite (OmniPoint) is the only non propriety system available to transit operators in the market today, and not only provides a straight forward easy to use interface on the backend, but also allows the simple integration of non-proprietary, off-the-shelf in-vehicle hardware and software to achieve a cost-effective yet scalable solution.
As we all know, the purpose for transit operators to adopt technology is to address a wide range of operational issues. First, is to provide the transit property with real-time capabilities that from a management and dispatching prospective allows the property to better respond to and/or avoid issues that impact service to the customer. From vehicle operators prospective, these systems help to relieve the burden of controlling many different onboard systems and allow the driver to stay focused on providing quality service to the public they serve. Then from a planning and analysis point of view, these systems constantly collect an incredible amount of actual performance and operational data that is crucial to planning future operations.
To date, there have been great strides in the accurate collection of data and development of systems that provide the benefits discussed above. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the systems available today have not yet solved the problem of providing the management staff with an easy way for making use of the data they have collected.
Realizing that a large percentage of the cost payback benefit for adopting technology comes from being able to more effectively utilize system resources, Avail has solved this problem by developing DataPoint, the industries most powerful and user friendly reporting, data mining and trend analysis tool on the market today.
Following the same concept that is behind all of Avail’s products, DataPoint has been developed to provide a point and click interface for not only analyzing data collected by Avail’s own product suite, but it comes “out of the box” with the ability to analyze and report on data collected from a variety of other commonly used vendor products such as GFI fareboxes and standalone APC systems.
For more information on how you can take advantage of the power behind Avail’s full line of open architecture software products, please refer to the products sections that follow.
