7 Questions to ask about School Transportation Management Software

After deciding that you need School Transportation Management Software, your next task is to decide which one to purchase. This is an important decision because you do not want to waste your valuable time and money.

1. Stability of the company offering the software: You should not purchase software from a company that is just starting up.  You’ll want to choose software provided by a company that has been in business for at least a couple of years.
2. Number of customers: If the software you purchase is used by 100’s of school districts throughout the country, there is absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t work for you as well.  For the most part, there is not a lot of difference routing school buses in Pennsylvania, Idaho, California, or any place in between.  
3. Quality of support: School Transportation management software is a big time investment.  You will probably be making  lots of calls when you are learning how the software works.  This is normal.  When deciding which application to purchase, you should ask for references, preferably customers that have been using the software a long time, and other customers that have recently begun using the software.  When speaking with the references, make sure to ask about the support that is provided.  How often do you get to talk to someone immediately? When a call back is required, how long does it usually take? Have there ever been instances where you were not able to get any support?  These are important questions to ask current customers.  Every software vendor is going to claim that their support is the best in the industry.  Don’t take their word for it, ask their customers.
4. Frequency of updates: Some software vendors will cobble together an application and then sell it as much as possible without even considering updates.  If a company hasn’t updated their software, or only does so every 5 years, you may want to avoid that vendor.  A company that updates their software on a yearly basis demonstrates that they are committed to providing the best possible application with many wonderful features that you will benefit from.
5. Licensing: You may be a small district, or a big district.  In either case, it’s important that you completely understand the transportation management software license that you are purchasing.  Most vendors will charge more money depending on the number of computers that you install the application on, but some do not. If you can, purchase software that offers a site license, allowing you to install the application on as many district owned computers as you would like.  You may only have one or two people responsible for routing, but there are certainly more people in your district that are interested in the results of routing, specifically the bus and stop assignments for your students.  If you purchase software that requires you to purchase licenses for each user, you will likely be frugal with your decisions about which computers to install it on.  That’s not information sharing, that’s information hiding, and it doesn’t benefit you or your school district.
6. Data import and export: Let's face it, tou have a ton of data. When deciding on your transportation management software, you should ask about its ability to import and export data. You do not want to manually enter all of your information.  Student data is changing all the time. You should strive towards doing regular imports from your student accounting software so that you can make sure your data is as accurate as possible. Importing data on a regular basis will prevent you from manually entering your data.  You should insist that your school transportation management software can import data from your student accounting software.
7. Ease of use: This is a tricky topic because everyone will claim it, and not everyone is right. Your school transportation management software should save you time, not waste it.  Given this, how do you quantify ease of use? You can ask your vendor for references (and actually call them). If other customers were able to learn the software and effectively use it to save time and money, you will too.  You can also ask about clicks per action.  Ask the vendor to demonstrate common tasks like adding a bus stop, modifying map data, importing data.  Watch closely as they do this.  How many button clicks does it take to add a new development to your map or modify a route? How accurate is the geo-coding process? How easy is it to modify the path for a route? Does it seem hard?  Easy? You be the judge.

Ask about common tasks, learn as much as you can, speak with customers that have been using the school transportation management software you are interested in.  This is an important decision, do your research and enjoy the benefits.