Walking in the shoes of transportation department is not an easy job. There are many factors that must be balanced in order to deliver an efficient, safe, reliable service to thousands of students each day. In truth, the job would be much easier if all variables in the transportation task were fixed and did not change from day to day. The reality is that each day in the life of a transportation department presents new challenges. New students arrive or leave district, new schedules or programs have to be offered, constantly changing staff need to be trained and managed, responses to breakdowns and accidents must be dispatched and dealing with numerous other issues. Naturally, these daily challenges drive transportation operations into a reactive mode where most actions are driven by “fires” or other situations that arise quickly. The entire organization typically evolves focusing on the capability to quickly manage reactive issues. When the department is constantly operating in a reactive mode it becomes progressively more difficult to focus on efficient planning. Often efficiency and planning are sacrificed for operational resilience.

In vast majority of school districts in the United States it is very common to find the same exact route plan, possibly with some slight modifications, has been used for years and in some cases decades. Since the transportation requirement is constantly changing as students move in and out of the district and graduate to different schools, how is it possible that the route plan remains static. The answer is that excessive “slack”, “inefficency” and “resilience” are incorporated into the plan and often increased from year to year to maintain “old”, “familiar” and “comfortable” operating practices. Since no one wants to leave their comfort zone, if is difficult to change habitual operating practices and find better and more efficient ways of providing transportation.

So, what does it take to be efficient? It starts with the strong desire to change and an open mind to the possibility that there are better ways of operating. The road to efficient transportation usually is comprised of several steps:

Assessment

You can only become more efficient if you know where you stand and have metrics and measures for your current efficiency.

Realistically defining goals and objectives

You have to know where you want to go before you make the first step.

Defining the measures by which you will measure the success

You have to have a quantifiable way of measuring the success in order to drive efficiency and improvement in your organization.

Planning

While often overlooked when constantly dealing with fires, careful planning is an essential step for reaching your goals and objectives.

Execution

A crucial step in the process is aligning the organization to deliver the benefits and outcomes of the plan.

Assessment

You end the improvement process where you began by measuring and examing the results of your actions while preparing to move forward to greater excellence. Excellence is not a destination. It is a repeatable process of looking for and implementing more efficient ways of operating.

If you answer any of the following questions as YES, then we can help:

• Does your district operate the same routing plan from year to year or similar routes with minor modifications?
• Would you like to know your total miles, cost per bus, students per route and other measures of transport efficiency?
• Do you find it difficult knowing exactly how much it would cost to change any policy or bell time schedule?
• Do you think you can achieve a higher level of efficiency?
• Do you struggle with on-time delivery?
• Do you experience budget pressures?
• Do you find yourself constantly fighting with fires instead of proactively managing the department?
• Do you have difficulty managing a choice program, complex homeless or special needs transportation?