The pilot project involved tests of a specialised system aimed at supporting the Department of Education in organising school transportation. The key objective prior to the implementation was to reduce the number of so-called soft issues related to the handling of bus trips by carriers and to detect situations where a child does not arrive to school or trips are not carried out as planned.
The key challenges the client faced included primarily the lack of adequate data during internal and external inspections and the lack of information on whether the carrier is performing their tasks on schedule. Another problem was the billing process for the tasks performed.
Before they started cooperation with Blees, the Department of Education in Gliwice had faced three major problems related to transporting children to schools. The most important problem was the lack of relevant data during internal and external inspections, regarding transportation tasks carried out. Another issue was the absence of a mechanism to determine whether the carrier was performing their operations on schedule. Finally, the city struggled with the complicated billing process for the work performed by carriers, which generated unnecessary process overhead.
In response to issues raised by the Department of Education in Gliwice, Blees implemented a system that consisted of three key elements:
The driver’s app enabled to present the route from start to finish of the trip. The user could see the location of the nearest bus stop and received clear information on how many people to pick up/drop off in a given place. Importantly, the app allowed to mark the arrival at the pick-up stop and the pick-up of the child, which ultimately translated into clear information about the carrier’s performance of their tasks.
The panel for the City Hall facilitated one-stop-shop management of school transportation. It contained the necessary information with a list of all the children including their place of pickup, caregiver contact details and the school where the child is to be delivered. In addition, the panel enabled to monitor rides, returning information on the performance of rides against the schedule. Other important functionalities included reporting and provision of detailed data on e.g. the number of children transported by period or irregularities occurring en route. The ability to communicate with the children’s caregivers was a valuable additional feature.
The panel for the carrier included an overview of individual vehicles along with the necessary data. It also enabled to enter route schedule and monitor transport operations in a manner similar to the City Hall panel.
“Innovative technological solutions often make people reluctant at first since they don’t like making changes to their approach to work or their habits, but people are also concerned whether they would get a return on their investment in innovation.
The approach we adopted with Blees, which was only a 4-month pilot, allowed us to minimise the risk of a negative impact of changes to the process of transporting children to schools on the operation of our organisation. At the same time, we were able to quickly evaluate whether the solution offered by the supplier would significantly reduce our problems, which was the most important for us. The pilot showed that the preparation of transport data for inspections, or the carrier billing process can be really simple provided that we use a mature technology.
We clearly understood that the direction set by Blees is consistent with the direction we must follow if we want to minimise the organisational overhead related to the transportation of children to schools in our municipality. At the same time, we have taken the first steps towards building relations with a private sector partner who can help us in the future to change public transportation in our city for the better.”
