Scheduling a Freelance Workforce at Scale: Drive Doctors and NFU Mutual
Drive Doctors deliver driver training. When we met them in 2014 they had just won a contract with NFU Mutual to run a different kind of course for young drivers. They've been running it on Alpaka since 2016.
NFU Mutual insure a lot of young farmers. They drive on country roads with mud, ditches, roadside trees and few streetlights, and statistically that makes them more likely to have an accident than drivers in towns.
The Drive Doctors team were two former racing drivers, and that shaped how they taught. Rather than a standard lesson, they showed young drivers where the limits are, both the car's and their own. How to judge a safe speed for the road in front of you. What to do when the car starts to slide. Drivers who took the course were involved in 23% fewer collisions than those who didn't, and in 2017 the NFU Mutual Young Drivers Scheme won the Business Sector award at the Northern Ireland Road Safety Awards.
The Challenge
The course was delivered by 244 freelance advanced driving instructors (ADIs) across the UK and Ireland. NFU Mutual sent through lists of young drivers who were eligible. Each driver had to be matched with an instructor near them, on a date that worked for both.
Drive Doctors had two part-time administrators. Over the life of the programme, that meant 244 freelancers with their own diaries on one side, and 12,500 young drivers on the other, each with their own availability. Every one of them had an individual relationship with the booking process. Doing that by phone and email would have needed a much bigger office.
It was clear from the start that this project was about automation and communication.
Why Alpaka
Most of what Drive Doctors needed was already core Alpaka. Contact and personnel records, locations, availability, scheduling and date clash detection.
What wasn't there was the course content. So we scoped the gap the way we always do: bespoke work built to sit inside and alongside the core API, not a separate system bolted on the side.
What We Built
Importing the drivers
NFU Mutual's candidate lists were imported into Alpaka as contacts. Each driver was plotted against their nearest ADIs by location.
Letting the driver pick the dates
Each driver was asked to suggest several dates they could attend. Alpaka pooled those options and put them to the local instructors who were available. Whoever could take it, took it.
No double bookings
Alpaka's scheduling and clash detection meant an instructor couldn't be booked twice for the same slot. It also gave the most flexibility to both sides. Freelancers only saw work they could actually do, and drivers got the widest choice of dates.
Email, then SMS
At first all the correspondence went out by email, automatically. It didn't work. Young farmers mostly didn't have email addresses, and the ones who did didn't check them. We moved it all to SMS and the response rate sorted itself out.
Online learning
We built an online learning module for the drivers to complete before and alongside their session: multiple choice questions and hazard perception videos. The course runs over three years, so the online modules keep drivers engaged between their on-road sessions. That work didn't stay a one-off. It became the compliance module inside Alpaka today.
Working to NFU Mutual's IT requirements
Working for an insurer brings security and data requirements. Drive Doctors didn't need to manage that side themselves.
"NFU Mutual had strict IT requirements, which we passed directly to Alpaka to adhere to and maintain that technical relationship."
The Outcome
Drive Doctors have run the programme on Alpaka for 10 years. NFU Mutual have put 12,500 young drivers forward for the course. More than 7,000 of them were booked into in-person lessons, and the rest completed the course through online learning. The work Drive Doctors do has prevented thousands of insurance claims, and it has saved lives.
That's a national freelance workforce run by two people, because the matching, booking and chasing is done by the software.
- Part-time administrators
- 2
- Freelance ADIs
- 244
- Young drivers
- 12,500
- In-person lessons scheduled
- 7,000+
"The clarity and automation Alpaka gave us meant our small team of administrators could handle hundreds of connections between ADIs and their student drivers, and schedule or re-schedule their drives."
Bespoke, but not separate
Most of what Drive Doctors use every day is standard Alpaka: contacts, availability, scheduling, clash detection and messaging. It's all available on the same plans as everyone else.
The bespoke part was the online learning, and it was built into the core product rather than beside it. Once it proved useful beyond one client, it became the compliance module every Alpaka customer has today.
If your process has a gap that off-the-shelf software doesn't cover, talk to us. We'll tell you what Alpaka already does and what would need building.
Three ways to get started
Try it yourself
A 5-minute guided walkthrough of Alpaka, no setup required, no data. Best if you'd rather get hands-on before talking to anyone.
Book a live demo
Talk it through with a solution specialist - not a salesperson. Ideal if you've got specific questions or want to see how Alpaka fits your setup.
Sign up free
Start right away - no credit card, no setup fees. The quickest route if you already know what you're after.
