Olympia School District in Olympia, Washington knows the value of safe and efficient planning and communication methodologies.
Home to 12 elementary schools, two high schools, four middle schools, a transition school and a Montessori school, Olympia SD transports over half of its 11,000 students on a fleet of 100 buses via 55 daily routes.
According to Olympia’s Director of Transportation Rhonda Morton (who herself has more than 20 years of experience utilizing Transfinder software), prior to adopting Transfinder in 1998, the district’s original programing was incredibly dated, utilizing Excel spreadsheets to manually track student information and plan routes.
“That was before Google Maps, so you actually just had a map that you looked at and pinned the map with the stops,” Morton said. “We got Transfinder right when it first came out and then of course it just bloomed from there.”
Transfinder has developed routing, scheduling, and fleet maintenance solutions since 1988, and is built on industry-leading mapping and geographic information system (GIS) technology to deliver superior location intelligence and logistics management solutions.
Transfinder’s continuously evolving selection of software solutions and services includes Tripfinder, a solution for managing field trip requests, approvals and resource allocations. The Tripfinder software enables district administrators to easily generate invoices, run transportation reports based on selected criteria, and add reports to the system to address the most common district requests. The Field Trip Detail Report includes all of the information a driver needs, such as pick-up and drop-off times and locations, directions, numbers of students and adults, phone numbers and notes. When the mileage, time, and expense information is entered into Routefinder, the cost reports function breaks down and totals the various expenses incurred. Built-in billing reports summarize costs by account code or by school, department or activity and provide you with the fiscal analysis tools you need.
“When we first adopted the software, we were using a program called Skyward, which is the program for the Washington State School System that stores all of the student information,” Morton said. “We were then able to import Skyward every night and download it directly into Transfinder which would then automatically create routes based on that information.”
After adopting Transfinder’s software over 20 years ago, the district began an extensive onboarding process, working with Transfinder instructors to provide staff with detailed and specific training and direction.
“Logistically when you bring them on, it’s a big setup,” Morton said. “They of course have to build your county map and then you have your roads and transferring all the student data into the Transfinder software, which at that time was a manual process.”
At the time, it was a big undertaking but over the years, Transfinder solutions have evolved to streamline the process.
“The payoff was amazing,” Morton said, “and it just keeps evolving over the years and they just keep making it better.”With Tripfinder, district personnel can define requestor and approval levels and easily add more users as needs change; enable or disable features; show or hide specific data; and allow or disallow access to particular reports. Tripfinder is authenticated with Active Directory so personnel have the ease and convenience of a single login and can easily switch to other Transfinder solutions without needing to sign in additional times.
“It’s just user friendly,” Morton said. “The schools are able to go in there and enter all their trips in Tripfinder, it comes to us, and then we approve it. We get all the information, and it automatically bills once you put in the hours. That was a huge significance on those fronts. The amazing thing is that Transfinder has never stopped growing,” Morton said. “They just kept getting better and better and better.”