23 February 2023 – Go East Anglia is building on its partnership with Omnibus by implementing timetable publicity solution OmniSTOPdesign to gain efficiencies and realise cost savings. 

OmniSTOPdesign enables the rapid production of public transport displays through customisable templates, which allow for route branding, graphics, logos and marketing messages. The solution links with OmniTIMES, directly taking timetable data from it to ensure information is accurate and up to date. 

The Go-Ahead Group-owned operator, which serves Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, also uses Omnibus for mapping, vehicle and crew scheduling, rostering and data exchange. 

Davina Langley, Marketing Manager at Go East Anglia, said: “Roadside publicity is a core element to the success of Go East Anglia and is used to draw customers to our services. The way we produce roadside media is not sustainable and is causing a big drain on important staffing resource.  

“OmniSTOPdesign will streamline the production of roadside media and significantly reduce internal resource. We’re pleased to extend our partnership with Omnibus, whose scale and depth of expertise will help us deliver a better service to customers.” 

Peter Crichton, Founder of Omnibus, said: “We’ve had the pleasure to work closely with Go East Anglia for years and this new agreement is a strong expression of trust in our expertise and solutions, which are continuously being improved to meet customer needs. 

“OmniSTOPdesign is used by both operators and transport authorities. The configurable template system provides full control over displays, giving users complete flexibility to deliver passenger information in the most appropriate format.”

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Go East Anglia: www.go-ahead.com

Omnibus Solutions: www.omnibus.solutions

Press contact at EPM Group

Harminder Sangha
harminder.sangha@epm-bus.com
07538 935 568

Yellow Buses is one of the early adopters of bus stop display software OmniSTOPdesign and the operator’s commercial assistant, Kevin Brolan, is the main user. 

The application gives users complete freedom over template design – with no need to go back to the supplier to make changes.

Used by operators and transport authorities, the software enables users to work with any paper size, font, font sizes, colour and graphics. It is designed to be flexible enough to meet operators’ unique demands and brand requirements.

Kevin explains how the templates available in OmniSTOPdesign have made his job easy and why he believes it is the leading publishing software for stop displays. 

Providing passengers with easy-to-read bus timetables is important to Yellow Buses – and the operator achieves this with bright and colourful information displays.

The Bournemouth-based company colour brands each service on its network using Omnibus’ timetable publicity software OmniSTOPdesign.

“Our iconic yellow vehicles, with core route branded colours, help our buses stand out on the road for customer ease,” said Kevin Brolan, Commercial Assistant at Yellow Buses. “We also reflect this with our roadside material, and this is done with ease thanks to the OmniSTOPdesign solution,” he said.  

“We can tailor the services and the individual times to show in different colours so customers can clearly see which service is coming at the stop at a particular time. It’s so clear for the customer and important to us as we know they can’t get too confused,” he added. 

Yellow Buses carries just under 14 million passengers on its 110-strong bus fleet, clocking up nearly five million miles across Bournemouth, Poole, Christchurch and East Dorset.  

The long-standing Omnibus customer adopted OmniSTOPdesign in 2019 and immediately benefitted from cost savings in human resource and timetable production (see case study). 

Kevin added: “I may be a little biased but the way in which we use the software is a brilliant example of its true potential and what can be achieved by operators. 

“We use a lot of imagery to brighten up our stop displays. This helps to promote our services and share a variety of marketing messages which include being a locally owned and locally operated business since the management buyout in 2019, promote our mobile apps, website and new services. It’s no longer just a timetable for a customer to know what time the buses come past; it has the potential to promote our business. 

“And it’s all done through OmniSTOPdesign, the software is absolutely brilliant, and we really maximise its features.” 

OmniSTOPdesign is a sophisticated application which enables operators and local authorities to create attractive and accurate public transport stop and station information displays. 

Kevin Brolan joined the commercial team at Yellow Buses in 2019 and is responsible for producing roadside timetables for all bus stops in the operator’s network. 

To do this he uses OmniSTOPdesign – an Omnibus publishing software solution he describes as “brilliant, logical and easy to use”.

It takes Kevin half-an-hour to produce PDFs for all 800 stops; it was previously taking up to three weeks and involved full-time support from a graphic designer.  

The commercial assistant highlights four of his favourite OmniSTOPdesign features. 

Customisation

There are so many features of OmniSTOPdesign that are great, but the customisability is the top one for me; the options this feature provides are endless. From one master template, I can create eight, nine, 10 different templates and each one will be different and tailored to our needs. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows users to create templates to any paper size, with a large range of layouts to choose from, and full freedom over graphics and fonts. Printed material is tailored to meet company specific brand requirements. 

Route maps

I particularly love the route maps as well. We’re a tourist town that attracts visitors and students who need to make informed decisions on how to get to places and route maps by locality makes this very clear. 

OmniSTOPdesign templates can include an automatically generated line-of-route map for each service, showing which places are served by the service and how long it takes the bus to reach them from the current stop.

On-stop display imagery 

Another great feature is the ability to advertise our services such as Buster’s Beach Bus. We insert an image of the brand into the service line to point the customer to the beach bus and it will tie in with our calendars as well. It’s also useful when promoting services offered by our partner organisations. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows users to insert graphics in any format to enhance the displays; all services can have their own branding graphic shown alongside the service details as well as promotional messages for other services. 

One size fits all

We struggle with our roadside infrastructure where we have several services going to one place that we haven’t got the roadside material to fit it in. Again, this is where the customisability feature is so brilliant; we can force the times in by resizing the departure dates and departure. Without OmniSTOPdesign, we would have to use multiple cases on bus stops which would be confusing for the customer. 

OmniSTOPdesign allows all text elements to be customised using whatever fonts and font sizes the user requires for that particular text element. 

Kevin said it is important for Yellow Buses to provide clear information quickly to customers: “By using OmniSTOPdesign, we can do that easily. For us it ticks all the boxes.”

In the first 12 months of the pandemic, Yellow Buses went through five network revisions – an “extremely difficult” and time-consuming task which the operator said was simplified by the Omnibus solution. 

The bus operator normally implements one or two small changes a year and larger revisions every few years. But COVID-19 temporarily changed this, and it had a significant impact on the Bournemouth-based operator. 

Yellow Buses uses Omnibus’ full suite of timetable and schedules modules, including OmniSTOPdesign to create at-stop information displays. 

Kevin Brolan, Commercial Assistant at Yellow Buses, said: “We’ve gone through numerous network revisions, one of the largest ones we did was in 2017. We did another major change in February 2020 only for it to last a month as a result of the pandemic. 

“The impact of the pandemic has been absolutely huge on our workload. Since the February change, we’ve had to do five different revisions of the network in all, so it’s been quite intensive. 

“Normally, all the on-stop run for 800 stops would be extremely difficult, but with OmniSTOPdesign we’ve been able to speed things up massively, so we can focus on all the other activity behind the scenes. Once we have it auto running, OmniSTOPdesign can PDF all our 800 stops within about half-an-hour and print them in a day. “To put it in context, for a service change that was starting on Monday, we would have all the material out on the previous Friday to minimise the disruption to the customer. The productivity of OmniSTOPdesign is absolutely astronomical.” 

Kevin added: “We are extremely satisfied with the Omnibus solutions and particularly in the case of OmniSTOPdesign. We would not have been able to implement the many different service level changes we have made to react to the fluctuating situation regarding the pandemic were it not for this intuitive and easy-to-use package.”