How a Washington State Public School District Transformed its Operations with Bytecurve360
Trying to get 7,500 students to school on time every day of the school year can be a daunting task.
There are a lot of moving pieces.
Drivers who call in sick. Busses that break down. Reconciling different pay grades for various roles.
And for every variable there’s often several spreadsheets with different categories and calculations that need to be updated and changed.
It’s like trying to solve a puzzle with pieces scattered in different locations all over the garage.
That was what management looked like for Tina Puljan and Michelle Turner at the Federal Way Public Schools Transportation Department for many years.
The verbal diagram Puljan explains may be hard to follow for the uninitiated, but it likely rings familiar to those who live with a passion for ensuring students travel to and from school safely every day.
“We were doing everything in the Google Doc spreadsheet, and I mean everything,” Puljan said. “We had a spreadsheet for actual route coverage, every bus number, the name of the driver responsible for their route, and their route times.”
“And we had another spreadsheet for each sub and what route they would cover. And another that would track buses alone. And another that tracked down buses or issues with buses.
And we had another with employee information, hire dates, and pay rates. And then we had another with all the sub driver issues.
And then we had one more for each day of the month. So, May had something like 40 tabs at the bottom that tracked all of the activities that made it all run that month.”
Lost track of the number of data sets and areas that needed constant management?
Seven at the least, and that’s not even counting payroll data.
The chronic challenge of tracking all this data was stress inducing on the very best days, and resulted in opportunities for honest human errors for even the most diligent and responsible managers on the days that didn’t run as well.
And with the persistence and widespread shortage of drivers and high parent expectations growing, this sort of practice was due for an upgrade.
“Looking back, it was just a lot to keep track of in all those spreadsheets, and there was so much disconnect that we had to spend a lot of time ensuring these points were connected.”
To add to this challenge, payroll was a separate system, obviously not communicating with static paysheets.
Enter Bytecurve360, a solution created by veterans of the student transportation industry for the unique challenges of managing a dynamic school bus fleet.
Central Command and Control: How Bytecurve delivers like an Air Traffic Controller
The complex choreography that constitutes student transportation management largely mimics the to-the-minute orchestration that keeps airports running like Swiss watches, seamlessly blending safety and on-time arrivals in a way that makes business travel and dream vacations accessible to the masses.
They share many of the same characteristics.
Safety is job one.
Dozens of mechanics, drivers, and support staff are moving in unison to transport customers.
And exacting schedules demanding precise departures and arrivals.
For far too long, student transportation professionals have been relying on outdated management tools, primarily endless spreadsheets, Puljan explained.
By merging data previously siloed in the routing and GPS fleet tracking technology solutions, and blending in payroll on top, Bytecurve creates a single yet comprehensive view into dispatch operations that empowers student transport leaders with a comprehensive view of their daily operations, saving time and money.
“It is a solution that enables a district to tie together routing, dispatch, and payroll into a single bundle,” she said. “And because you have payroll tied to the routes, you see it all, which gives you a visual of actual versus scheduled.”.
“Knowing what’s really happening gives you a sense of transparency that was hard to imagine before we had this system.”
Add the historical analysis tool, and Bytecurve360 users enjoy real-time actionable data as well as trends that can be mined for further route and run tweaking.
“My team and I spent years working on the student transportation industry before we decided to build this tool, so we know from a unique first-hand perspective what challenges need to be solved,” said GP Singh, CEO and founder, Bytecurve. “From the alerts about late drivers to our simple ability to break up routes with just a few clicks, we’ve built a solution that solves some of the most pressing daily obstacles school bus fleet managers face and helps them deliver better service.”
Connecting Routing and GPS Fleet Tracking: Transforming Operations
Explaining Bytecure to a school bus fleet manager may be a bit like explaining a rideshare mobile application in 1999.
Sure, nearly every school bus manager has some degree of familiarity with routing and GPS tracking software solutions, long established as the technology pillars of the industry.
But few have considered a new solution that merged these two while blending in payroll to deliver what Singh believes can be the third pillar of operational safety and efficiency.
“We hadn’t seen anything that had paired dispatch with the time clock that allowed you to see if a driver had not clocked in five minutes before the route was set to begin before Bytecurve,” Puljan said. “There are a lot of great technologies out there, but none that connect the dots in this way with so many critical assets of our dispatch center communicating with each other.”
Bytecurve today enjoys open integrations with every one of the major routing and GPS fleet tracking providers, meaning there’s no extra work for fleet managers to integrate these software solutions to deliver the Bytecurve360 benefits.
“We work with customers like Federal Way to establish the system for them and with them, ensuring they’re not burdened with another technology but instead have an out-of-the-box experience that simply helps them be more proactive and less reactive,” Singh said.
Proactive Management: Staying Ahead of Parent Calls
Federal Way today has about 150 buses that make roughly 101 daily runs, transporting about 15,000 students between their elementary, middle, and high schools.
Like most school districts, parents rely on the bus to ensure their children arrive not just safely, but on time to ensure a full learning experience. But with the driver shortage and chronic absenteeism among current drivers, meeting that expectation is a persistent challenge.
That’s why the alerts about late drivers are such a powerful tool for districts like Federal Way.
“We’ve had more than one time, when the driver was a no show but we hadn’t heard from them yet, and the system (Bytecurve360) flagged the dispatcher, and she was able to catch it ahead of time, and she was able to get a sub on it,” Puljan said.
“It’s a big deal in our district because we have a communication plan with our parents, and we tell them if the bus is going to be late by 15 minutes. If it’s more than 15 minutes, it’s another layer of communication.
So, catching missing drivers sooner is a very big deal to help us avoid parent calls and having to activate the parent communication plan. Every time the system flags it for us, it saves us a lot of time and potential parent frustration.”
Decreased Management Investment on Payroll
Federal Way previously had an inefficient and siloed payroll system that didn’t integrate with their other supporting technologies. The administrative savings on managing their complex payroll have all but paid for the Bytecurve360 investment.
“The time spent on payroll is way down,” Puljan said. “We were a week behind; now we’re a day behind. Payroll has been the biggest, most noticeable piece for how it’s streamlined our processes.”
I love it. I was just talking to another district about just the payroll aspect and how much it can help them. That’s how much it’s helped us improve.” – Michelle Turner, Executive Director, Student Transportation, Federal Way Public School System
She said the system has not only decreased the time spent executing payroll, but also increased the opportunities to catch costly mistakes.
“I’m sure we’ve caught more opportunities to not pay drivers for time not spent working,” she said. “The visual showing when they are leaving and returning to the yard and how it sets it all for you removes all the guesswork. And that takes out the human error potential for mis-paying someone.”
Breaking Up Routes: Improved Real
Time Performance
Time savings are not just found in improved payroll operations.
Bytecurve 360 and its driver mobile application, Drive On, have allowed dispatchers to more efficiently re-assign drivers without the tedium of daily hand-written notes.
“We used to hand write notes for what drivers had to do and put them in their mailboxes,” Puljan explained. “The dispatcher does not have to hand write all these notes. And the driver just gets the text in the Drive On app and goes.”
“The majority of drivers are using the app now,” she explained. “They like that they can get in and see their schedule for the day. It cuts down on the communication between our drivers and the dispatch every morning as everyone knows what they need to do that day.”
Added to improved driver communication is the ability to break apart routes and runs for increased flexibility in responding to the daily dynamics of missing drivers and changing routes.
“We break routes apart, and we break the run apart,” she said. “This is not unusual for us to be doing every day, and Bytecurve makes that so much faster and easier to understand than our spreadsheet system.”
Less Anxiety, More Control: A Mood Shift Powered by Improved Visibility
A school bus manager in Wisconsin who also leverages Bytecurve explained the comprehensive visibility as delivering, “Centralized Command and Control.”
Puljan said it delivers crucial operational information before she needs it.
“I feel like we’re more proactive than reactive,” she said. “That’s been the biggest change for us. We’re more in control and less reactive to that specific day’s challenge.”