VanDocs

VanDocs is a proposal for a documentation management system for Campervan / Motorhome rental companies. This documentation is the lifeline for the renter, answering the obvious and not-so-obvious questions that inexperienced campervan enthusiasts might encounter while on the road. That could be simple questions about the lighting or the bedding, complex questions about the electrical system or the gas-powered fridge, or anything inbetween.

VanDocs aims to address the following disconnect: a customer rents a single vehicle and is only interested in the documentation for exactly that single vehicle. They don't want vague answers which say it might be like this or might be like that. However, the organisation manages a whole fleet of different vehicles, and doesn't have the resources to separately manage a documentation system for each one.

The solution: the organisation manages a single set of files, which covers all the vehicles in a hierarchical way — the information which is common is only written once, and the specific information at the corresponding level. Then VanDocs generates from that a set of input files for each individual model or model variant, and calls hugo to generate a single website for that model.

VanDocs overview diagram

The generation process produces a website for each model variant

The vehicle comes with a link to the specific website for exactly that vehicle, and the customer always receives detailed, accurate information specifically answering their questions. The information can be conveniently accessed from laptops, tablets and smartphones over the internet. And the customer service operators can of course also benefit from quick access to all the same information.

The benefits

For the customer, they now have a detailed and specific set of documentation which answers their questions without ambiguity — instead of saying that the van might have this or might be arranged like that, the language can be specific and reassuring. The documentation can also be easily made available in multiple languages.

For the telephone helpdesk, the customer may not need to call as often, as the documentation will be easier to navigate and easier to understand. If the customer does call, then they can give the identifier of the model variant and the helpdesk has access to the same, specific information without having to ask which vehicle it is.

For the rental company, they can offer a greater level of service to the customer with a minimum effort of maintenance.

Flexibility

When a new model is introduced, only the parts of the documentation which are different need to be written, reducing effort. If general information needs to be updated, which is common to all models, then it only needs to be updated in one place, and all the websites can be regenerated from there — no copy/paste required and no duplication.

Results

The output is a set of websites, one per model or model variant. So if you have large vans and small vans, and all the vans of each type are identical, then that's only two websites. But if there are two different kitchen options for example, then four websites can be generated with one execution of VanDocs.

Obviously the operator will want to put their own branding on these pages to match their own marketing materials, in terms of colours, fonts, styles and logo imagery. Which language or languages need to be supported? Do we need a choice of theme variants (such as light or dark) or only one? The following are therefore just simple examples to illustrate what's possible.

English light

English in light mode

German light

German in light mode

German light

Portrait mode without menu

Dark mode

Interior using dark mode


The first two examples show a light themed variant, showing the availability of English and German for every page, selectable from the menu on the left. The third image shows the responsiveness of the resulting website, automatically collapsing the menu when the browser width is too narrow (for example, on smartphones) — the menu is of course still available from the hamburger icon.

Finally, the fourth image shows a darker theme variant on a wider screen, with menu highlighting and internal links.

What makes this van-specific?

In principle, the ideas here could be used for any documentation management system. Yet several features of Campervan rental seem to make these ideas particularly appropriate:

VanDocs

This is why this proposal became called VanDocs, and why we're now looking for van rental companies to work with us to put this into practice.

I'm guilty of using the terms "van" and "campervan" also to refer to motorhomes, but the system is obviously designed for both. The reason it's called "vandocs" is just that "motorhomedocs" doesn't work very well as a name.

Next steps

Currently we have a small prototype working, with a basic CLI interface. This demonstrates the principles of website generation from the input files on the left to the website on the right. This prototype runs as a Java application, and uses the open source site generator Hugo to produce a single site for a single model (in multiple languages). The next step is to find a Van rental company to get behind this project, so that it can be tailored to the exact requirements.

As soon as a partner company is found which is enthusiastic about collaborating on this, we can identify the best way to push it forward — does the rental company want to buy it as a product and run it themselves, or do they want to buy it as a service and have it run by the activityworkshop? Do they want to obtain exclusive rights to VanDocs, so that VanDocs is not offered to any competitor organisations, or are they happy for multiple rental companies to get involved? What are the requirements in terms of feature requests, upgrades, response times, hosting agreements and so on?

There are a lot of open questions, but I'm sure this is a great opportunity to produce something unique and hugely beneficial.

If you're interested, please get in touch!

VanDocs // Questions