Bus Transportation Recommendations

Case Study

Situation

South Bergen Jointure Commission (SBJC) is a Coordinated Transportation Services Agency (CTSA) designed to provide services to local school districts in New Jersey. One of those services is coordinating public, non-public, and special education transportation to students at a costs savings per district. The billing and student information needed to coordinate this service was entered and stored in an outdated DOS database. This was time consuming and more
difficult to verify the accuracy of data.

“The DOS program was outdated and considered obsolete, and did not meet the needs of the SBJC,” said Karen Senario, SBJC’s Transportation Manager. “The integrity, efficiency, and improvement ability of the program is always a concern.”

It was time for the SBJC to move forward and find a more user-friendly billing system that would be more accurate and save time.

Solution

SBJC chose BusBoss to create a billing system program that integrated with school bus routes in order to better serve the districts. SBJC and BusBoss worked together and customized the program to best suit SBJC’s needs.

More benefits emerged when Karen started at SBJC. She worked with BusBoss programmers to improve the BusBoss system and make the Transportation Department run more efficiently. Together, SBJC and BusBoss created the first online transportation student request form that district personnel can fill out and submit online. SBJC receives the information instantly, and there are no more missing forms that were mailed or faxed.

SBJC and BusBoss also created an online Excel form to automatically upload student and school information and print in the desired format. This allowed information about thousands of students to be submitted instantly, which was especially helpful during high-traffic times, such as the start of the school year. Karen estimates that these changes have increased the efficiency of the SBJC Transportation Department by 35% in processing requests.

The SBJC is satisfied with how BusBoss has improved their billing system and department’s efficiency. “BusBoss is always willing to help bring SBJC’s ideas to life, and the SBJC is always thinking of more ways to improve efficiency in the department using the BusBoss program,” said Karen. 

Results 

Increased productivity by 35%

While the SBJC is still required to enter student information by hand for individual students daily, the large task of preparing for summer school and the school year information using the upload saves time for both the districts and the SBJC. In addition, BusBoss added a more feasible way to verify that the information submitted is correct for each student. “That was a big-time change,” said Karen. 

Removed the need for overtime

“Previously, there were four staff members working in the Transportation office at one time, and there were times that they had to work overtime and come in the office on Saturdays,” said Karen. “All the changes implemented and the use of the BusBoss program eliminated overtime.” 

Eradicated the problem of missing forms

Karen said that there have been zero forms reported missing by the district or SBJC during the past two years of using the custom BusBoss program. Either it was submitted or it wasn’t with the online program,” said Karen. “There is no room for human error.”