Weld County RE-3J School District in Colorado has been actively enhancing their transportation services to ensure safety, efficiency and reliability for their students. A significant aspect of this improvement involves the adoption of advanced routing and transportation management solutions provided by Transfinder, the leader in the industry.
Implementing Advanced Routing Solutions
Leading the effort is Nate Forbes, the transportation supervisor who has been with the district five years, following 16 years as a dispatch supervisor at UPS. Forbes, who’d worked overnights at UPS, made the move to school transportation so he could spend more time with his children.
Weld County RE-3J is one of the largest school districts in the state geographically, located in the largest county in the state, just 35 miles northeast of Denver. Transportation covers about 500 square miles and Forbes’ team transports 1,050 students on 14 large buses and three smaller buses.
Forbes’ move to school transportation was far from smooth.
“It was a mess of a department,” Forbes said. He wasn’t pleased with the transportation software the district was using.
At UPS, he was used to dispatching 75 drivers delivering 24,000 packages a day. When he logged into the product the Weld County district was using, it was sluggish.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “It was slow. The technology just wasn’t there. It took so long to zoom in on a map, to move a kid and route a kid or route that bus. I mean, it was taking me days to do what should have taken 10 to 15 minutes.”
That set him on his own journey about two years ago to find something better. He watched webinars, did some trainings, heard sales pitches, spoke with others in the industry. In total, he looked at five different companies and their products.
When he saw Transfinder’s award-winning Routefinder PLUS technology in action. One demonstration showed all the functions he was trying to do with his legacy product but couldn’t.
“You could grab a group of kids in a geographical area and it automatically routed them. You weren’t having to pick each individual student,” he said. “It was, in my opinion, very, very user friendly.”
The pieces of the puzzle then began to come together.
Standout
Asked what made Transfinder stand out from the pack, Forbes talked about the Transfinder sales team that was also “user” friendly. He didn’t feel the pressure that other companies he was dealing with were applying by overloading his inbox.
“I get turned off by that,” he said. And what Transfinder was providing was better than what he was seeing. After speaking to colleagues in the industry, reading online reviews and watching videos, it became apparent that Transfinder’s advanced routing technology was significantly better than the others.
“Just looking at map routing students, it’s just super easy,” he said. “I had a driver come in on a Wednesday and tell me that his last day was on Thursday. I cut out the route and moved those kids around and made sure parents were communicated with.” He was out of town and checked in with his team who confirmed things went smoothly.
Last year, when he hired a new secretary, Ashley Diller, he found himself out of the office during her first two weeks on the job. He encouraged Diller to look at the Transfinder Community site, to look at Routefinder 101. Between the great DIY tools in Community and the intuitiveness of PLUS, Forbes said she picked it up very quickly and could be a backup router when he wasn’t available.
The Need for Responsiveness
After turning to Routefinder PLUS, Forbes set his sights on Transfinder’s other award-winning solutions, the driver app Wayfinder and parent app Stopfinder.
“I just got everything I could get,” he said.
His previous experience with a different vendor was not so positive. “The customer service was horrible” at the district’s previous vendor, he said. On top of that, the product wasn’t reliable. Not helping things was the vendor’s constant employee turnover.
“I’d be talking to this guy and then two weeks later it’s this guy and it was just constant movement within their company. They weren’t very quick and responsive.”
He said in some cases it would take as many as eight business days before getting a call back from a previous vendor.
“When it’s a technical issue that’s too long,” he said.
Forbes said he needs responsiveness as he deals with challenges within the district. He said that, for a period of time, the district experienced dwindling enrollment but there are pockets in the district that are growing.
“That’s probably our biggest challenge,” he said.
When changing or consolidating routes, using Stopfinder to communicate with parents is extremely helpful and his staff loves the solution.
Stopfinder ‘Super Easy’ To Use
“They said, ‘This is super easy, especially with Stopfinder,’” he said, referring to informing parents of route changes. “We really have pushed that this year. They’re like, ‘This is super nice, seeing where the buses are at and getting the notifications.’”
The way to get more buy-in on the parent app was informing parents that they could find their student’s routing information through Stopfinder. He said the district constantly promoted this with parents in various communications.
“They would call the office and we would not give them their student riding information until they downloaded the app,” Forbes said. “We spent a lot of time on the phone and walking people though it. But in the long run it has made it so much better.” He estimates about 90 percent of parents are now using the app.
Forbes said Stopfinder has been a huge help keeping parents informed.
“We had a pretty big construction project that was supposed to be done in the middle of July and it didn’t wrap up until the end of September. Our buses were running late because there was no way to go,” Forbes said. “So I just sent out a quick notification saying we’re going to pick up 10 minutes early at magnet stops (subdivisions). I can see who’s reading it. I love that ability.”
He sent the notifications only to the families impacted by the construction rather than blasting to an entire route.
“Parents will tell you that they didn’t see anything and I can say, ‘You opened it at this time,’” Forbes said. “You opened it. If you didn’t read it, that’s on you.”
Parents are also good at providing feedback through the app, though sometimes, they tell him more than he needs to know.
“I think when I roll it out next year I’ll put a blurb in there saying you do not need to let me know little Johnny’s going to be out sick next Tuesday,’ Forbes said.
Viewfinder a time-saver
The district also has Viewfinder, which gives a customizable view of a district’s transportation operation. It also provides reader-only student ridership information to unlimited users, which district personnel can access to answer parent questions.
“I like it. We have a few of our secretaries who are very proficient in it and can go in and see what they need to see,” he said. “It’s saved quite a few phone calls on my end.”
Customer service
After dealing with subpar customer service from other vendors, Forbes has been amazed by the white-glove treatment he receives from Transfinder.
“The training was outstanding,” he said. “I was very, very surprised with the training. It was very, very good, very detailed. And when I had a question, even after the training, I could email the trainer and they were very responsive, very quickly.”
He said the trainer knew how to put him at ease at a stressful time planning for the new school year. He hit a “wrong” button and thought he lost two to three weeks’ worth of work just days before school starting.
“I had a moment where I thought I was going to cry. I’d panicked a little bit,” he said, laughing. “The trainer said, ‘Calm down. It’s archived.”
She brought up everything where they’d just left off. And when he has a question, he still gets responses quickly and Transfinder team members will hop on a call to walk him through something.
“My experience has been great,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anything I would even suggest changing. It’s worked out well.”
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