Ferdia’s platform is helping coach operators plan smarter, reduce dead mileage and boost margins – all with a single click.
Ferdia has unveiled a game-changing addition to its coach operations platform. This powerful new feature has been designed to take the complexity out of coach scheduling by providing automated and optimised planning.
Håkon Sæther, CEO of Ferdia, said:Co-planner gets to the heart of Ferdia’s dual mission to both simplify operations and help businesses become more profitable.
Similar systems have been in play for a while in other sectors, such as logistics and freight, and significantly reduce the amount of time to schedule a day’s work, reducing time taken allocating vehicles and drivers by up to 90%.
Having seen the challenges coach operators are facing, we began prioritising solutions that can help reduce admin time, optimise driver and vehicle capacity and ultimately make it easier to drive profits. This led to Co-planner becoming a key part of our development roadmap.
With Co-planner, operators can now generate fully optimised trip plans across their fleet with a single click. Whether the goal is to minimise the number of vehicles used, reduce dead mileage or cut admin costs, this intelligent scheduling assistant finds the best sequence of trips for each vehicle based on the objectives you set.
What sets Co-planner apart is how it empowers operators to connect sales and planning in a more efficient way. Instead of relying on the traditional linear process, where sales provides a quote and planners later confirm availability, operators can use Co-planner to create a more automated, circular workflow. Availability data can be fed directly into the quoting stage, enabling sales teams to factor in capacity earlier, adjust pricing accordingly and reduce delays. This approach streamlines processes, improves accuracy and supports faster, better-informed decision-making.
A New Era of Coach Scheduling
Ferdia first presented Co-planner as a proof-of-concept at Eurobus 2024. This early iteration (Version 1) automatically assigned vehicles to trips, considering core information of the trip and vehicle.
Taking on board feedback from operators at the event, Ferdia’s developers are currently working to provide additional features such as advanced trip requirements, implementing cost factors and enabling users to choose objectives for optimisation, while ensuring the solution remains simple to use.
Sæther said:Technically the variables are unlimited and details are pulled through from the request made by a client at the time of booking, but you can expect to see things like differentiating VIP/executive/standard spec vehicles, and specialist features such as USB ports or Wi-Fi. The system will also recognise things like emissions specification or vehicle livery if this is a specific requirement for a job.
Co-planner is currently being used by a number of customers across Scandinavia and the UK, and these early adopters have already seen significant reductions in planning time – from hours to minutes – while maintaining full control and transparency over the generated plans.
The additional capabilities were rolled out in August, and in the near future Co-planner will be able to plan drivers on both EU and domestic hours. It will also be able to recognise driver absence and vacations, and interact with the Ferdia Co-Driver app to monitor driving hours – the aim being to support compliance by automatically flagging if jobs need to be changed the next day due to trips overrunning and drivers exceeding legal hours.
Built for Today, Ready for Tomorrow
Ferdia is working closely with its clients to deliver the full benefits of Co-planner, and plans to develop further integrations that make it even easier and more profitable to run a coach business.
But while the Co-planner is a great feature in its own right, what’s equally important is the way it fits into the digital ecosystem of an operator, notes Sæther.
Sæther said:Our ambition is to develop both Ferdia products and APIs that allow the exchange and flow of information seamlessly through our centralised platform, providing operators with the data, knowledge and recommendations to inform strategic decision making across every aspect of their business.
This article first appeared in the Bus-News Magazine Issue 2 2025. Download the full PDF version here.
