Case study School Transportation Requests Management

CLIENT

Centre de services scolaire de la Beauce-Etchemin

INDUSTRY

Education

CONTEXT

The School Transportation Department of the Beauce-Etchemin School Service Center provides daily transportation for approximately 14,000 students using its fleet of 250 vehicles covering 25,000 kilometers daily within the 55 municipalities served.

Students and their parents can submit annual transportation requests for various reasons. Each year, around 2,000 individual requests are received and must be processed.

Before implementing our solution, the School Transportation Requests Management Software, requests could be sent by email or phone.

Challenges Related to Transport Requests

Responding to many customers with a small team from May to October was a huge challenge.

Agents had to handle different types of requests, including:

  • QUESTIONS
    • First, some parents had questions of a general nature or about a previous request awaiting processing.
    • This enormously multiplied the calls and emails to be processed, reducing the time available for processing requests and creating a vicious circle.
  • PROCESSING TRANSPORT REQUESTS
    • Then, treating transport requests posed challenges since there are measures to take to respond to a request.
    • The delays between the request and the processing of the request were too long.
    • Several carriers had difficulty getting in touch with technicians between May and October due to an excessive volume of calls and emails.
    • Processing requests requires particular expertise, and only technicians can do the processing.
    • There was no system in place to effectively govern the processing of requests.
    • It became difficult to have an overview of the requests to be processed.



Proposed Solution

In collaboration with our partner Logic-6, we offered our customer a solution, the School Transport Requests Management Software.

The client wanted management software to help reduce the number of calls or emails to be processed, thus allowing technicians to devote more time to tasks requiring their skills and less to administrative tasks.

Soluqual offered personalized PARTS Software for processing requests. The proposed solution comprises internal software to help technicians process requests, facilitate communication with requesters, and thus considerably reduce the time required for low-added value tasks. On the other hand, the solution also includes an external portal, allowing parents to ask questions, make requests, and monitor the progress of their requests they made, considerably reducing the number of calls and emails to be handled.

This external portal also allows private schools and carriers to make requests that could automatically be given a different priority level.

Results Obtained

Following the design of the School Transportation Requests Management Software, we supported the client in launching the application.

After a few weeks of use, the system already had several hundred requests. All requests from parents, private schools, and transporters now go through the management software.

According to Jérôme L’Heureux, Director of Organizational and Informational Resources, their initial objectives were achieved and even exceeded.

For the team of technicians, this is the first year they managed to manage all the requests before leaving for the vacation period. Usually, this time is exhausting, but with our solution’s help, they could process everything and even got a head start.

Conclusion: Discover The Benefits of Our School Transport Management Software

By opting for a solution based on PARTS, the team at the Beauce-Etchemin School Service Center considerably reduced the processing time for school transportation requests and the risk of error. This approach made it possible to offer better quality service to clients and greatly facilitated the work of internal resources.

Initial goals to reduce the number of emails and phone calls were not only met but exceeded. Thanks to their new application, all requests and follow-ups were processed 100% through the software and a lot faster. Parents can access the School Transport Requests Management Software themselves to monitor the status of their requests. In fact, these follow-ups are even less necessary given the reduction in processing times.

Contact us to find out how PARTS can help you too.