BLURRING THE LINES
HOW LONG TILL YOUR DMS KICKS YOU TO THE KERB?
Article by Rob Finlayson City Cars Glasgow
rob@citycarsglasgow.co.uk
Since the dawn of dispatch software when we still compared it to being almost as good as pen and paper,
the relationship between fleets and
dispatch management system (DMS) providers has been largely symbiotic. Operators ran fleets using the tools provided by their chosen software partner and everyone understood their place in the ecosystem.
Operators brought drivers, vehicles, customers and local market knowledge. Dispatch providers supplied the technology that allowed all of those moving parts to work
together. It was a relatively simple
arrangement and one that has served the industry well for decades.
Lately though, I’m beginning to wonder if that relationship is starting to change.
The recent investment by Veezu into Cab9 caught my attention and not because there is anything particularly unusual about an operator investing in technology. What interested me more was what it says about the direction that the wider industry is starting to lean toward. We are seeing operators become increasingly interested in software, software providers becoming increasingly interested in the operational side of the business and the line between the two becoming more blurred every day.
At first glance the suggestion that a dispatch provider could ever become more important than the fleets it serves sounds ridiculous. The tail doesn’t wag the dog. Dispatch providers exist because operators need software. Without fleets there is no customer base, there are no bookings and there is no revenue. It is a perfectly reasonable argument and one that, even five years ago, I would have agreed with wholeheartedly.
The problem is that the industry is changing and changing quickly.
10
Twenty years ago a dispatch system sat quietly in the background allocating work and generating reports. Today it sits at the very heart of the operation. It manages bookings, payments, customer communi- cations, driver communications, business accounts, reporting, analytics and increasingly the decision- making process itself.
The modern DMS doesn’t simply support the business, it has become woven into and is ingrained into every aspect of it.
At the same time customer behaviour has shifted dramatically. Passengers are increasingly loyal to convenience rather than companies. They care that a vehicle arrives quickly, that they can track it on a map and that payment is seamless. The operator’s name has become less important than the experience being delivered through the technology. More so with the ability to use a single app on some software to book a car anywhere in the world. That should be a slightly uncomfortable thought for all of us because it means the software is playing a bigger role in customer retention than ever before.
What makes this particularly interesting is the sheer volume of information now sitting within these systems. An operator sees their own fleet. A dispatch provider sees hundreds if not thousands of fleets. They can see demand patterns, acceptance rates, driver behaviour, customer trends and operational performance across the entire world.
In all respects the software providers now have a better view of the market than the operators themselves. You know what your drivers are doing every minute of the day. Your DMS knows what tens of thousands of cars are doing every minute of the day, and believe me they have access to far more data than you will ever see. That is an incredibly powerful position to occupy and one that becomes more valuable with every booking processed through the platform.
This is where my mind starts wandering into slightly more uncomfortable territory. The taxi and private hire industry has spent years worrying about aggregators,
JULY 2026 PHTM
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