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.”