Proximo are a car rental company with a difference. 

Not only are they a company who won the covetted business of the year award a few years ago, but they specialise in providing replacement taxis. This is a very unusual company with very unusual business requirements.

We are all familiar with the vehicle rental business. For many years Laser Byte have provided special systems to handle Credit Hire. Credit Hire is where a vehicle is provided as a replacement for a vehicle damaged in a no-fault accident. It has special requirements over and above the normal daily rental conducted by companies such as Budget (although they use Tracs too!), Avis, National.

Proximo supply replacement, plated taxis to taxi drivers who have had their taxis damaged in accidents or whose taxis are out of use.

Taxis are a special type of vehicle. They have to be authorised by the licensing authority and have to be plated accordingly. You cannot just replace a taxi with any other vehicle.

None of the car rental systems that are available have any capability of tracking plates, nor keep a library of plates. In addition, Proximo use an accounts and case handling system that requires being updated with anything that happens within the case. Again, none of the systems available would handle this level of integration and so the only way of running 2 systems together would be to manually synchronise the systems on a minute by minute basis. This is fraught with mistakes and if one system were updated without the other being updated, then this would lead to chaos in the business. It would be financially prohibitive to try to keep the systems in step with each other,manually.

Laser Byte provided a specially modified version of Tracs. This system had a plate library which tracks where each plate is and monitors which vehicle they are attached to at any one time.

In addition, we developed a 2-way system of updating the Case Handling system and Tracs, with messages such as Hire Has Started going to the Case Handling System to let it know that the replacement taxi is with the driver. Similarly, Tracs tells the Case Handling System when the replacement taxi has been returned and off-hired. We even send through the invoice at the end of the rental.

The system has been in and operation for a number of years now, and works seamlessly and faultlessly.

As they say..... “It does what it says on the tin.”