Turbo Dispatch - History

History

On 30 June 1994, a group of representatives from the UK seven major motoring organisations and the Institute of Vehicle Recovery were invited a meeting at Brooklands Museum. Brooklands Museum was chosen as the venue because the meeting's chairman Andy Lambert was involved with the museum, having transported the vast majority of the exhibits there, and could therefore show people items they would not normally get to see. He clearly hoped that this would be enough incentive to get ‘the clubs’ to sit-down in the same room together. It soon emerged that it was a shared dream of all those present that ‘common standards’ for all aspects of vehicle recovery could be introduced to the industry. Amongst other things, this group laid the foundations of Turbo Dispatch project.

Because of the reliability of delivery needed it was decided that Mobitex should be used. In the UK kingdom there was only one provider of Mobitex, namely RAM Data, which later became a subsidiary of BT called Transcomm. This is why many users still refer to RAMing jobs. Ian Lane of Motor Trade Software (MTS) designed and wrote the protocols along with the gateway software. Much pioneering work was carried out during early 1995. In the autumn of 1995 Green Flag and Delta Rescue were the first motoring organisations to start experimenting with transmissions to the garages, with the first genuine job being sent to Southbank Garage at the end of the year.

The point where most recovery operators learned about Turbo Dispatch was during the Association of Vehicle Recovery Operators' AVRO EX 1996. Despite it being Green Flag's 25th Anniversary, the motoring organisation set up a mini ‘Control Room’ at the show and let people see for the first time how the system worked. By the end of that year the Automobile Association had set up a trial in London, sending jobs to selected recovery operators.

Towards the end of 1997, the AA's Evan Anderson became greatly involved in promoting the concept of Turbo Dispatch within the AA. This was undoubtedly the turning point, because Evan seemed to accept that although MTS and RAM did have a monopoly, it was not an intentional one. Anyone else could develop a system, but quite simply nobody else had successfully done so.

In the following year, the RAC went live and by the end of the year all the major players in the industry had adopted Turbo Dispatch. By the year 2005 it is estimated that around 92% of the 4 million ‘garaged’ breakdowns a year were sent to recovery operators using Turbo Dispatch.

The system is clearly popular with motoring organisations, because of the saving in job dispatcher talking on the telephone to recovery operators. What surprised a lot of people was how popular it was with the operators as well, mainly for the same reasons. A busy controller does not want to take job details over the telephone, when he can have it appear on his computer screen. Because he could then use the same system to dispatch the job to his driver, it meant the whole process could be handled in seconds.