The Ultimate Guide to School Bus Tracking Systems for Fleet Owners

School bus tracking softwares have made the life of fleet owners easy by automating all the fleet management related tasks. Managing multiple fleets without the help of a software solution is a tedious task and is not as productive and time saving.

Using a software solution for school bus fleet management has a lot of benefits to offer and enables the transport managers to optimise the routing, dispatching, and navigation of school buses along with minimizing the delays and downtime. The map view showing the real-time movements of bus and time tracking offer the added benefit of promptly informing parents about any delays.

School bus tracking solution empowers the fleet owners to generate comprehensive reports on various aspects, including overtime, vehicle utilisation, route details, logistical inefficiencies, and travel records. With proper records and real-time tracking of their fleet services the fleet owners can provide the best services and can make necessary improvements to gain the competitive edge among other fleet service providers.

Before delving into other significant aspects of a school bus tracking software beneficial for the fleet owners, it’s important to understand its primary functionalities.

A school bus tracking app serves multiple purposes to its different set of users including fleet owners, driver assistant, parents and the school administration. Firstly, it assists drivers in establishing efficient routes that enable them to pick up students while optimising the fuel consumption. Moreover, it aids in creating schedules for picking up and dropping off students with designated time frames. Additionally, it ensures safety of the students and keep school administrations and parents in loop by tracking the current location of the school bus during their commute to and from the school.

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School bus tracking solution

What Features Should Fleet Owners Look For While Choosing a School Bus Tracking Software?

With plenty of options available in the market, it is important to identify the right software for your needs so that you can fulfil your purpose in a cost effective and productive manner. When selecting a school bus tracking software, it’s crucial to ensure that the following core features are included:

1. Routing:

The software should assist the drivers in finding optimal routes to pick up and drop the students in time, provide accurate directions and optimise the fuel consumption. You can eliminate any inefficiencies related to delays in reaching the bus stops through routing and the routing module should be easy to use, allowing you to create and edit the routes efficiently.

MANTIS is an effective school bus tracking solution that along with the routing, also provides the geofence feature allowing you to create a geo-fence around the bus stops to track the timely reaching and departure of school buses from respective bus stops. It makes the school bus tracking more effective and helps in identifying and predicting any delays which can be notified to the parents and school administration, making the coordination easy.

2. Real Time Bus Tracking:

As the name signifies, a school bus tracking solution is expected to provide real-time bus tracking, allowing the users to view the current location of the bus on map and ETA, at any instant. It allows the fleet owners to be updated which bus is where at any instant. With the real-time location information being available, it is easy for the fleet owners to make any routing changes required to cover up the tasks of another driver in case of any uncertainties. Also, with real-time bus tracking feature, the app provides location and ETA updates to all the users including driver assistant, parents and school authorities, creating transparency and making the life of fleet owners easy.

3. Driver Management:

An effective school bus tracking system should allow the fleet owners to create and manage the driver schedule and facilitate proper communication between drivers and school authorities. MANTIS provides driver information in-app allowing both the school authorities and parents to communicate with the driver in case of any information exchange required.

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school bus fleet management system

4. Automated Attendance System

The latest school bus tracking solutions like MANTIS, provide the feature to capture the student attendance automatically by reading the RFID tags for student identification, attached to student’s bags or water bottles, whenever they onboard the bus. Onboarding and off-boarding of the students is recorded online, and notifications are sent to the parents and school authorities. MANTIS is cloud-based and allows you to capture as well as save the records online for required intervals of time making the record keeping process easy and paperless.

5. Track Multiple Fleets

With multiple buses running for a school or multiple schools, it is difficult for the fleet owners to have different apps for different buses. Therefore, it is important for an effective school bus tracking software to show data from multiple buses at one place. With MANTIS, you can view you multiple fleet on a single map view at any instant, making the tracking and route optimisation easy.

6. Reports and Analytics

An effective school bus tracking system is the one which provides detailed reports on captured data, making the decision making related to fleet management easy. These reports can be used to identify and make effective changes related to route optimisation, requirement of adding new routes, requirement of new fleet and driver behaviour monitoring, hiring or replacement of driver and much more.

MANTIS provides detailed reports and easy to understand dashboard with analytics in the form of graphs and charts, allowing fleet owners to get the required insights with ease. The reports can be customised to view data related to specific routes, bus, driver or specific time interval as per the requirement.

If you are a fleet service provider for schools, looking for an effective school bus tracking solution, feel free to reach us at: 8800443333