Summer Best Practices

Summer Best Practices with Transportant

The end of the school year is a time to reflect. You've managed through the year; now what can you do to prepare for the next school year so it will be even more successful?

Learning

Just as summer preparation helps students hit the ground running in the new school year, comprehensive training on the Transportant system ensures your transportation team is ready to provide a smooth and stress-free experience for students and drivers. For this reason, Transportant has been preparing learning materials to help you refresh your current knowledge and learn new skills. Transportant is also continuously adding new features that customers request to help solve your problems.
Transportant is always updating the system with new options and functionality. Make sure you are aware of and know how to use the latest updates by reviewing the New or Updated Features section.
If there is any additional training that you would find helpful, let our team know at support@transportant.com.

Set Your Goals For Next Year

Is there functionality that you have not implemented yet but would like to before the next school year? The Transportant implementation team will work with you to develop a plan to get the turn-by-turn directions, student ridership, or parent app launched. Summer is a great time to get ready for these new functionalities. This has also never been easier for schools with limited resources. Transportant can now support your team by doing some of the work for you with Transportant Solutions. To learn more about Transportant Solutions, see this article. Contact support@transportant.com and let them know what your goals are. They will put you in touch with an implementation expert and get you a quote for Transportant Solutions if you are interested.

Hardware

Take an inventory of all equipment that is either not working or that is waiting to be returned from the factory. Make sure that Transportant’s understanding matches your own. Transportant has created a system health checklist that will help you through this process.
Any equipment that is not working should be returned to the factory as soon as possible for repair before the next school year. For even greater reliability, summer is the perfect time to upgrade to the newest V4 equipment.
How to identify equipment that may need to be repaired:
  1. Ask your drivers. They will know better than anyone if there is something not working as expected.
  2. On the dashboard, open Device Management - Alerts. As you click on the alerts you will see that many provide descriptions of what they mean and next actions.
  3. On the dashboard, open Device Management - Device Health. Entries in red merit investigation.
Once you have identified equipment, send your list to our Customer Success team at support@transportant.com for confirmation and a returned goods authorization. The Customer Success team will provide you with a shipping label to return the equipment for warranty repair. It is important that you only return equipment authorized for warranty repair by Customer Success. Any unauthorized equipment will either be returned to the customer or completed when all other equipment is repaired.
Customer Success periodically sends fleet report cards, which are lists of suspect equipment with troubleshooting steps or a recommendation to return the units. Completing these tasks promptly will give you the highest opportunity of getting repaired equipment returned as soon as possible. 

Routes

Getting your routes right is the key to unlocking the capabilities of turn-by-turn directions, ridership, and the Bus Compass parent app. The summer is a great time to either set up your routes for the first time or review your existing routes to make sure they are as efficient as possible. The most efficient routes have the minimum total deadtime. Deadtime is the time from bus barn or school to the first stop, and time from the last stop to school or bus barn.
You should also look for cases where the drivers are driving a route different from what is entered in Transportant. Either route could be correct, but the drivers will need to explain why they are driving a different route to understand which is the best. You can see the differences between the planned route and the actual path by going to the Routes page, selecting a route, clicking edit, and then adding a prior GPS trace over the route. Differences in the actual verses planned route are opportunities for improving the route or the drivers' compliance.
Setting up your first routes can be as simple as linking Transportant to your existing routing software, or you may need to build routes manually if you currently are not using routing software. Transportant has a few tools to help you build your first routes, from learn mode to having Transportant Solutions develop them for you. Reach out to Customer Support at support@transportant.com to work with them to develop the right plan for you. 

Student Ridership and Bus Compass

Implementing ridership and the Bus Compass parent app can be daunting. The two biggest challenges are issuing bus passes and making sure your buses are accurately following the routes. Having clean data (route performance) is critical to providing parents with accurate information. If the data is not accurate, the parents can get inaccurate information through Bus Compass. While this is challenging to implement, the rewards are worth it. Schools that have successfully implemented ridership and Bus Compass have reported a significant reduction in parents calling the school and a reduction of lost students.
Previously, the path to getting to Bus Compass required you to distribute bus passes, implement ridership, and drive routes consistently with students assigned to stops. Now you can implement Bus Compass once you start driving the routes consistently with students assigned to the stops. Done this way, parents will not get information about their specific students, but they will get notification about the arrival time and visibility of the location of the bus.
If you would like to implement Bus Compass or ridership, please contact support@transportant.com to develop a plan that is right for you.

Back to School Checklist

Here is a recommended timeline and checklist to help make sure you are ready to go on the first day of the next school year:

June

  1. Contact Transportant Customer Success at support@transportant.com to schedule a back to school check-in meeting. They will go over the checklist with you and help you develop a plan for the summer.

June and July

  1. Perform functionality checks on each bus to assure hardware is working as expected.

July and Early August

  1. Ensure routes are built and are being imported from the previous school year's database.
  2. Some third party systems (e.g. Transfinder Pro, Transact) have database ID fields, and customers need to specify the correct database IDs to distinguish between the previous school year, summer school, and the coming school year.
  3. Ensure bus passes (fobs, etc.) are properly assigned to students.
  4. Ensure students are properly assigned to the routes and stops, and that turn-by-turn directions are accurate.
  5. Do dry runs to ensure the routes are working as expected. Use route performance to validate individual route times and how well the route timing is working. 

How We Can Help

For additional training, support, or to inquire about Transportant Solutions or hardware upgrades, contact support@transportant.com.

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