For UK bus operators
Run-out, allocation, defects, servicing, live telematics — the whole engineering workflow in one date-aware system that protects every scheduled mile.
The status quo
Nobody outside the workshop knows what's off the road, why, or for how long.
“Funny noise from the back” — reported at 11pm, lost by the 6am handover.
A hundred-plus assignments rebuilt on a whiteboard or a home-made spreadsheet — when most of yesterday's board was right.
One missed PMI is a prohibition notice — and a conversation with the Traffic Commissioner.
“What happened overnight?” shouldn't be a mystery you solve before 7am.
A bus goes missing without VOR ever moving. The board says one thing, the yard says another, and someone spends the morning walking the rows.
None of this is anyone's fault. Garages have been forced to mix paper and digital — defect books here, spreadsheets there, a system that covers half the job — so there's no single source of truth. General fleet products don't understand the bus engineering workflow; it's complex enough to demand its own system. That's the gap LumiBus was built to close.
One system, the whole cycle
One defect book for everything.
A critical defect makes the bus unfit automatically — and fit again once it's fixed.
Every defect feeds one picture: which buses are fit for tomorrow.
Engineering decides what each bus can do today.
Buses due a service are pre-marked automatically — a person's mark always wins.
Marked buses and classified running numbers go to allocation, ready to match.
Buses onto running numbers, onto bays.
One press applies the plan — every page from here shows it.
The buses pull out.
The fleet is out, working its duties.
A bus stopped off its route is flagged as a possible breakdown.
Defects reported on the road move to the workshop's list at every shift change — nothing waits for morning.
Buses come back; the workshop works through the night.
Temperatures, pressures and brake wear are already on screen when the bus reaches the pit.
Miss an inspection and the bus is made unfit automatically — finish the work and it's released.
Finished work clears the defects and sets the date for the next service. The cycle starts again.
Every switchover, changeover and cadence is configuration.
LumiBus runs on your garage's clock — not ours.
Live telematics runs underneath it all — positions, health, geofences.
The system
01 — Run-out
Everything on the road, date-scoped: every running number, the bus covering it, and its status. Running numbers arrive already categorised — spreadovers, late departures, early finishers — straight from the schedule. When a bus fails mid-service, the swap is a recorded substitution — reason, available-bus picker, reminders, full history.
Every mile accounted for. Every swap on the record.
02 — Allocation
Allocation stops being a memory game — fewer things to hold in your head, fewer calculations at 9pm. Auto-allocation assigns buses to running numbers for you: it respects the engineering markings, matches each running number's departure and arrival times, and places buses by proximity to the exit so the run-out flows smoothly and NSBs don't happen. A mismatch is flagged before the bus is on the board — not at 5am on the yard. And an unfit bus simply cannot be dragged into service.
Hours back, every single night.
03 — Fleet overview
The Fleet Overview is where engineering's decisions live: fit or unfit with reasons, defects at a glance, and the day's run-type markings — LATE OUT, EARLY FINISH, or your own. Date-scoped, so markings apply to the day they're made for and expire on their own.
The whole depot working from one truth.
04 — Defects & the workshop
From a driver's running repair to an in-house workshop job: photos, severity, full history and recurrence linking, so the fitter sees what this bus has done before. Open running repairs transfer automatically at every shift changeover you configure. And a safety-critical defect marks the bus unfit on its own — no memo required.
22:41 Driver reports: “brakes feel soft”
22:41 Safety-critical → bus marked unfit, off tomorrow's board
23:05 Night crew picks it up — full history attached
04:50 Repaired, signed off, fit — back on the board
No lost repairs. Fewer morning failures.
05 — Servicing & DVSA
Rotating inspection cycles — A/B/C/D services, two-year, MLR, PDI — scheduled per bus, with overdue chasing and a forward workload forecast. Fitters work the service step by step — pass or fail each item, record the readings — and the inspector signs it off on screen. Records render as white-label PDF documents you'd hand to an examiner. Behind it, a full audit trail — who marked the bus fit, who signed off the repair, when the inspection happened.
No prohibition ever caused by a missed date.
06 — Telematics & geofencing
Live speed, air pressure, temperatures and fault codes, updating every couple of seconds while the bus is driving. Draw your depot boundary on the map and know the moment a bus enters or leaves — before anyone radios it in. Alert rules feed the same fitness and defect workflow your workshop already runs. This isn't another map portal engineering never opens.
Problems caught while the bus is still earning mileage.
The copilot
“Mark 47121 fit — repairs complete, pads replaced.”
“Which buses are still off the road, ranked by priority?”
“What changed between six last night and six this morning?”
Voice input for the pit. A morning briefing for the manager. Dozens of questions it can answer and actions it can take — against the same system of record, with every change audited.
Why it pays
Every un-repaired bus is lost mileage against the contract. Missed performance moves real contract money. Night-shift hours are the most expensive in the garage. LumiBus was built with that arithmetic as a design requirement, not an afterthought — VOR visibility, allocation carry-over, changeover transfer and overdue chasing all exist because of it.
of daily allocations repeat day to day — yet most garages rebuild the board from scratch every night
of daily allocation is reactive rework — sickness, breakdowns, late changes
day off the road is deducted mileage on a TfL contract — VOR isn't a whiteboard problem, it's a money problem
Industry statistics — UK bus operations research, not LumiBus results.
Getting live
Schedule import direct from iBus — running numbers and blocks arrive exactly as your garage already knows them. One-click TfL import covers every London route.
Import straight from your published BODS timetable — any UK operator, no re-keying.
And when the schedule changes, it re-imports itself — weekly, automatically.
Thirty minutes. Your depot, your routes, your running numbers.
Your rostering system keeps the drivers — LumiBus takes the buses off the whiteboard. No rip-and-replace: schedules import straight from iBus, BODS or GTFS.
