Technology should be used to make processes efficient and life easier for all involved

Spending your time running around chasing parents to pay transport invoices, or making last minute bookings and then scrambling to tell the drivers?

For many schools this sounds familiar, however it doesn’t have to be the case, especially in turbulent times of budget cuts and lack of funding. Your management team may not have been wrong in terms of bus management, but there was simply one issue with the plan – running the day to day operations efficiently.

At OFEC (Route-R), our core belief is that technology should be used to make processes efficient and life easier for all involved. For a school ensuring safety of its pupils, providing parents with an easy solution to manage their children’s transport, enabling easier administration and generating a steady flow of income is essential. The transport office/department is usually one of the most overlooked side of a school.

Route-r is a school transport management system that takes care of all requirements in an easy and seamless manner. Our system saves time and cost by automating large parts of the bus booking system and reduces overall manual overhead.

Top 5 benefits of having a top school bus booking management system:

1. Empowerment through information

Having to manage and maintain the integrity of a spreadsheet has never been more important than in a school where core operations are managed on a spreadsheet. If you were lucky the spreadsheet sat on the network drive, and you could quickly nip over to the next colleague along, and open it to see the latest information. Except of course, when it says the ominous ‘locked for editing by User’.

Route-r offers role-based solution which allows the sharing of key information via three views, the staff view, the parent view, and the (ultimate) admin view. Of course, being GDPR ready, we make sure that personal data protection is hardcoded into the design so compliance is never a concern.

2. Seamless flow of income

Taking on bookings is the next hogger of resources we often see with our customers. Of course, we need to make sure that we’re bringing in new registrations regularly, but it is nuts to think that a new person should be hired to manage this. Right? We offer a seamless front-end solution that integrates with the core system, which helps you by taking care of new registrations all by itself. You can simply refer the parents and guardians to your website, and they get to explore the perks of the school bus management all by themselves. The system is built keeping in mind the end users so that parents can adopt to it without much difficulty.

3. Planning for the future

Proving effectiveness can be a pain when a lot of the hidden and intangible costs aren’t accounted for. While the bus bookings may be bringing in new revenue, it’s draining money in staff time taken to manage bookings, communication to all parties back and forth, and the maintenance of the information on top of their regular duties. Having Route-r in place you can rest assured that there won’t be any sink holes draining the money elsewhere, as our all-in-one solution enables a seamless interface for both back end and front-end activities, alongside our scheduling, reminder and communications packages. With this in place you can go forth and collaborate with local authorities and even hire out the bus when not in use, as you have clarity and full overview of all scheduling.

4. Top level management

What’s more you can easily find the KPIs that will speak to the management team in terms of the impact of your transport management within the school. They can then make the decisions they need to make that will enable the school to thrive, rather than fire-fighting scheduling issues, or dealing with data protection issues or simply waiting for the ‘list’ that they need.

5. Closing the loop (of communication)

As inferred to above, making sure the right people have access to the right information is key in the successful management of any service. As for your transport management system, what’s easier than having a front end to which parents can log-in and view the routes, bookings, and register children and pay for the transport? That is of course, having the back-end roles aligned with this in giving an officer view for the day to day management of the service as opposed to unlimited rights that’s given to the admin role (so that you can rest assured that no one, save the admin, can ‘break’ the system). You don’t need to be a techie to navigate the back end. In fact, you can share the load for the system by giving access to more than one member of staff as they can manage activities: a comms officer, or the principal can be given access to manage communications, whereas the accounting can be managed by the relevant officer, and the day to day management needs become almost non-existent. No more emails back and forth to you from the comms officer (and one correcting typos) and no more back and forth with the accounting team when consolidating payments. They can do what they’re best at.