Multiple vehicle dispatch

[nsbstokes]

I volunteer at festivals where we run a team of 4x4's providing festival 'taxis'. At big events it can be a real pain trying to keep tabs on jobs and times etc. I have been using T Cards but I need to get more up to date ! I'm a novice excel user, but a quick learner - so I have set myself the challenge of trying to make something to do this. I am hoping that with help I can figure my way to doing it :-)
What I need to do:
record requester data - band name, POC name, phone and email, vehicle size required (5 seats, splitter van, minibus), pick up location (time and date), drop off location (time and date), if towing a trailer is needed,
Festivals are no longer than 7 days long but run over 24 hours
We may have up to 15 vehicles - I can populate a list of vehicles / capacities
We allocate a vehicle to an available competent driver - but I need to record who drove what for the task (ie driver name and VRM for the truck)
Workflow - a vehicle is sent on a task - pick up band A from location 1 at a given time and date, take to location 2 - we may get a pick up by xxx or a deliver them by xxxx time, just to make things a bit more complicated (ie band xxx needs to be at stage 2 for xxx time)
We can use a list to record the times between each site/stage location - but that would be huge list and complicated (and may change quickly - weather etc) so its probably best we input the task duration manually?

I'd like it to be able to show everything on a calendar - so drivers can see what they have got, the organiser can see how busy we are etc
I'd like to automate times so you cant have more booking that resources - so we do not over allocate vehicles / drivers (as is often the case at the moment!)
I'd like to sort out a report that gives a list of all the task we did over the festival to the organiser

I can populate a list for locations (some festivals may have 20 or so locations!)

Any help very greatly received :-)

[Pepe Le Mokko]

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[Richard Buttrey]

The most important thing you should do is create regularised 2 dimensional tables/ranges of data. That means one column for each TYPE of data and the rows record the various entries for each column. When I say TYPE of data I don't mean for instance separate columns for each vehicle. I mean a colum called Vehicles which would record the vehicle references available.

Is this a system for juts recording what HAS happened or a system for also aiding you establish which drivers/vehicles ARE available

It sounds like you need databases for
Requesters information
Vehicle details
Driver details

If you can mock up some examples of the sorts of things you want to see and some of your basic data the n doubt we can help further

[nsbstokes]

Thanks - I have made a start on a sheet - which I will post up later today (as I left it on my home PC - Doh!)