In fact, by eliminating just one school bus from your fleet, you could save approximately $50,000 in direct and indirect costs.
School bus transportation inefficiencies, such as routing and scheduling, have a profoundly negative impact on expenditures. Employing three people to juggle various Excel spreadsheets and manually plan school bus routes for weeks or months on end is an exercise in wastefulness – in personnel, resources and time.
However, school bus routing software comes in all varieties. It’s important to partner with a provider who offers the following services to maximize your total cost of ownership:
The features, tools and various integrated add-ons of bus routing software doesn’t mean much if your staff doesn’t know how to use them.
To utilize the fleet management solutions offered, you need free or low-cost and convenient training that drills down on the details of the routing software’s products and features. These training details include how to effectively maintain and manage your various school bus transportation data points, set up user-defined fields and generate reports.
Your school bus routing software should be user-friendly, but that doesn’t mean you won’t have questions or need guidance as you work toward creating efficient and sound fleet management solutions. Technical issues are counterproductive to the timesaving capabilities bus routing software provides.
The right routing software provider should offer you customer support any time you need it via a live chat about a product or technical issue. Along with live chat, you should be able to call a toll-free support line as well as access online support that includes remote software-user assistance.
When trying to cut back on expenditures for your school district, waiting six months for your bus routing software to be installed is less than ideal. You need a fleet management solution that starts working for you right away.
Look for a bus routing software provider that offers implementation in less than 30 days. You want to ensure that, along with the set up of your software, you also get one-on-one training and a complete import of your current data, so you’re ready to start optimizing your school bus routes right away.
While the route optimization features of bus routing software are bound to present you with cost-savings, you must ensure you partner with a service that builds training, support and quick installation into the packaged deal. Without these three services, it’s far more challenging to maximize all of the software’s features to save time and money.
Ready to learn more about how school bus routing software improves your route optimization? Click here or call 484-941-0820 to speak with a BusBoss student transportation management expert.