A local transportation company gets many of their ride opportunities through a third-party medical ride scheduler. Each day the transportation company logs into their third-party scheduler’s website, downloads a spreadsheet, and copies the details into their drivers’ daily manifests. Besides being tedious and time-consuming, the process was often fraught with errors.

Since the company already had a solution provided by another developer who had since stopped supporting them, I initially was asked to get them out of a bind with their existing software. After quickly assessing the existing code, I was able to fix some immediate shortcomings to get them on the road again, pun intended. However, I then went on to recreate the functionality in a more efficient way, which not only cut out a major external system, but also enhanced the stability of the application. The new application automated the login, browsing and downloading process. It parsed the rides and placed them as events on a calendar where the user could simply drag rides to the driver’s calendar. They then simply clicked a button to produce the driver’s daily manifest. These automated processes significantly reduced the time it took to schedule rides and virtually eliminated rider mix-ups or wrong addresses.