A new brand of school transportation management solutions is making its way to school districts nationwide.
Last March, 10 school districts began pilot testing the new product suite known as Traversa. Now, training documentation is complete, and a full product rollout has begun, said Ted Thien, senior vice president and GM of Tyler Technologies’ Verstrans group. Thien added Tyler will continue to service and develop Versatrans “for the foreseeable future,” but the goal is to eventually switch customers over to Traversa.
First announced at the NAPT Summit in October, Tyler touts Traversa as the next-generation, Web-based transportation management solution designed specifically for the mobile environment that offers a core of five tools for supporting fleet, operations and personnel management. Officials said Traversa provides a “seamless user experience” for routing, planning field and activity trips, tracking work orders in the shop, scheduling fleet maintenance, and tracking vehicle location and student pickups and drop-offs.
Thien noted that Traversa also includes “entity” management tools for students as well as transportation staff. The product is being shipped with an optional electronic roll-out sheet that allows school districts to track vehicles as they roll out of the yard in the morning in addition to the number of drivers who reported for work that day. The result is they can make last-minute substitutions on the fly, he added.
Parents will also be able to use the online Versatrans My Stop application with Traversa to see the location of their child’s bus and to receive an expected time of arrival for pickup or dropoff. Thien said other solutions aimed to work with Traversa include Tyler’s eTimekeeper to track employee attendance and linking the data to payroll.
Traversa uses GIS-mapping data from partner Esri and integrates with essentially any school bus GPS provider.
Editor’s note — See the February magazine edition for a Q&A interview with Tyler’s Ted Thien.
