Capistrano Unified School District switches to busHive to manage field trips

Capistrano Unified School District, Juan Capistrano, California
School District

The Client

Capistrano Unified School District in San Juan Capistrano, California, educates over 50,000 students, and is one of the largest districts in the state. The district operates over 3,000 field and athletic trips each year, with a fleet of 120 buses.

The Challenge

Capistrano’s previous field trip software was difficult to use. Billing took weeks, and morale was low from the constant frustration of trying to get the old system to work properly.

“With our old vendor, we were always behind,” says Jay McNamara, Transportation Operations Manager for the Capistrano District. “To bill the field trips, my staff had to actually cut and paste information to format it the way our district office needed it. Information typed on one page didn’t automatically transfer to the next page, so the same information had to be put in over and over. It was a lengthy and frustrating process. Many times, the information didn’t get saved, and we didn’t get much help from their customer service when it came to fixing all these glitches. They were basically non-responsive. It took two weeks to go through one month’s worth of field trip billing.”

The Solution

Highly customizable field trip software from busHive, which saves time and money.

“Now, billing for one month only takes two hours,” McNamara says. “busHive’s support team is very helpful, responsive, and they customized everything that we needed.”

With busHive’s field trip software installed, everything runs like clockwork. Requests are simple, paperless, and billing is done in a snap compared to the old system. Field trips aren’t lost. Buses show up on time, get back on time, and the field trip requester even knows the bus driver’s name that has been assigned to drive their trip. The system also tracks trip costs and can invoice based on school, department, or budget code.

Assigning trips to drivers can be customized in an automated rotation based on trip quantity, driver seniority, availability, or alphabetical order, and also prevents driver overtime by calculating past and future routes and trip hours.

“I can’t really put a dollar value on the money we’re saving,” admits McNamara, “but our customer service to the schools has improved tremendously. Requests are easy, my dispatchers are happy with the more streamlined process, and my drivers are happy that they have turn-by-turn directions.”

The Return

Streamlined, easy to learn software resulted in a more efficient department, and happier employees.

McNamara highly recommends busHive’s Field Trip software. “Working with busHive has been great. They are professional, super responsive, and willing to take the time to listen so that we got exactly what we needed. Learning to use it was pretty intuitive, the system works smoothly, and we couldn’t be happier.”