As transportation systems become more complex, handling their management and oversight similarly becomes a more complex task. In the past, you may have done well enough scheduling and routing your vehicles with strings and pushpins on maps, and using simple radio (or cell phone) contact to keep in touch with drivers on the road.
School districts throughout North America are being urged to up the level of safety they provide to their students, while at the same time cutting costs. While this is not an easy feat, it’s also not impossible, due to ever advancing transportation industry technology.
GPS systems have totally changed how vehicle fleets are managed in the 21st century. Rather than having to rely on radio contact and guesswork to keep tabs on drivers and vehicles, it's now possible to have live accurate updates on your buses where ever they go. These GPS systems, no different than the ones in cars these days, give you constant updates through software on the whereabouts of your buses.
There are a lot of transport software solutions on the market today, aimed at enterprises at various levels of proficiency. However, when we were developing our Transport Software we realized that the most powerful software in the world really isn't much help if it's hard to use. School districts are on tight budgets. You need software that anyone in your administration can use, not something that requires a computer expert.
As transportation systems become more complex, handling their management and oversight similarly becomes a more complex task. In the past, you may have done well enough scheduling and routing your vehicles with strings and pushpins on maps, and using simple radio (or cell phone) contact to keep in touch with drivers on the road.
If you're responsible for overseeing school bus operations – or any sort of fleet of land vehicles – I don't have to tell you what a challenging task it is. Your cargo is beyond precious, you have potentially hundreds or thousands of “clients” (parents) to answer to, and in the meantime, you have to constantly do everything you can do to keep costs down. But without compromising safety, of course.
One of the most difficult tasks when it comes to managing dozens of vehicles and drivers is the nightmare of having unorganized documents on all of that routing data and information. Missing documents can mean a very bad time when it comes to reporting, auditing, and redistricting and could potentially mean losing your job if the organization is really bad. Instead of having to spend so much time properly categorizing and cataloguing all of the work that goes into route management, let the computer do it for you with the help of a vehicle monitoring system.
Running any sort of contracted school bus service is a difficult job, with razor-thin profit margins. Far too many schools are seeing their budgets cut every year, putting more pressure on you to squeeze as much as you possibly can out of your fleets and systems.
In the hugely competitive marketplace we face today, it is critical for savvy Transportation Directors, Superintendents, and Business Managers to better manage every single business process from your transportation equipment to your drivers to your transportation dispatcher. For example, in fields like bussing, there are several ways you can streamline the work of your dispatchers to ensure they are operating at optimal potential.
Back in the old days, keeping track of each individual vehicle's gas consumption, mileage, and possibly repairs meant a lot of reports, careful tracking, and possible human errors in the system. And when it comes to bigger fleets of buses that are transporting kids everyday, having to track and monitor each bus was especially difficult. Unfortunately, things couldn't be as efficient, but now we have the ability to keep track of an entire fleet through technology and save money while doing it.
