Transport operations run on information that is generated a long way from a desk: a vehicle check, a shift handover, a defect noticed at the roadside. The gap between that moment and the system of record is where most of the cost and most of the risk sits.
We have closed that gap before. ECS Group Command tracks plant and people across sites with live location, inspection status and utilisation, and captures site work on a phone with no signal required. RailGard AI scores fatigue risk across a workforce rather than relying on self-declaration. Both were built for rail and infrastructure, and both translate directly to fleet, depot and roadside operations.
Insights
Compliant hours and a tired driver are not the same thing
Hours rules cap how long someone can be on duty. They were never designed to measure whether that person is fit to drive, and the gap is where incidents happen.
Read the articleThe defect that was reported, and then waited
Daily vehicle checks are near-universal and largely wasted. The problem is rarely the check — it is what happens in the hours after one finds something.
Read the articleDesigning for the disrupted day
Most travel software is designed around the timetable. Passengers judge it almost entirely on the days the timetable stops being true.
Read the article
How we support changemakers in travel and transport
Set up and run teams
We work inside your teams rather than at arm's length from them, with people who will sit in a depot, watch a shift handover and understand why the paperwork looks the way it does before proposing to replace it.
Launch new products
We build to production standards from the first sprint. Transport software fails in the field, not the demo, so we test against poor signal, gloved hands, bright sun and the phone someone actually owns.
Discover new propositions and customer experiences
Booking, ticketing and journey information all live or die on how they behave when something goes wrong. We design for the disrupted day rather than the timetable.
How we strengthen your team
Scheduling and live asset visibility
Plant, vehicles and people tracked with live location, inspection status and utilisation, so allocation is a decision rather than a guess. Built once already for rail and infrastructure, where kit sat idle on one site while another hired in.
Software that works without signal
Capture once on a phone, offline if there is no coverage, and sync when signal returns. Nothing is re-keyed back at the office and the record assembles itself.
Forecasting that earns its place
Predicting overrun risk, spotting bottlenecks before they land, and surfacing the resourcing problems that would otherwise be found the week they bite.
Fatigue scored, not declared
Every shift assessed from the roster before it is worked — time of day, shift length, weekly hours, recovery time, night working and consecutive duties — with each contributing factor logged so a score can be defended rather than taken on trust. Built already for rail, where a compliant roster and a rested driver are not the same claim.
Defects that close the loop
Checks and defects captured at the vehicle in seconds, with photographs and no signal required, then given a severity and an owner immediately. Anything above a threshold marks the asset unavailable in the same system that allocates it, and closure records who signed it off against what work — so the history is a chain rather than a stack of forms.
Licences, competency and expiry
Licences, medicals, CPC hours and course completions tracked against each person with automatic expiry alerts and digital ID with QR verification. Lapses surface weeks out rather than on the morning of the shift, and the compliance evidence assembles itself as the work happens.
White paper
Offline-first software for field and depot operations
What changes when the phone is the primary device and the signal is not guaranteed: data capture, conflict resolution, sync strategy, and designing forms people can complete in the rain.
Our work
Let’s talk
Have a problem you need to solve or an idea you want to explore? Let’s talk about how we can make it happen.