KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Apollo was a god of many things to ancient Greeks, ruling over light, the sun, art and knowledge. It’s an appropriate name for the National Association for Pupil Transportation’s new online, data decision-making and networking service.
Six years in the making, NAPT is rolling out the new subscription-based, mobile-enabled program to members this week, with Executive Director Mike Martin making the formal announcement Saturday morning during the summit opening business meeting.
He explained that Apollo is the new name for NAPT’s previous 3D project that determined and defined a list of key performance indicators, or KPIs, to assist student transporters with making operational and budgeting decisions. He added that the Apollo project is expected to be fully populated and functional by next July.
Members will sign in and create user and fleet profiles based on 37 different pieces of essential information they submit. In return, Martin explained, each user will receive back 36 KPIs that link them to other similar school districts across the country and, eventually, the world. The idea, he said, is to better connect members based on operations, fleet size, geography, student population and more that they have in common.
Apollo will let users to manage all their social networking accounts in one place to ease communication as well as chat messaging functionality. It will also give users the ability to create graphs and charts based on data submitted and to launch specific group projects.
Martin said Apollo will roll out modules on maintenance, safety, purchasing and fleet over the next 10 to 12 weeks. In all, he said the service will eventually provide users with more than 250 different metrics to use in their operations.
NAPT is demonstrating Apollo for the remainder of the conference.
