GPS SAFETY, MONITORING AND TRACKING CASE STUDIES
Discover how NorthStar's customers reduce their costs and improve their safety by implementing our school bus and child tracking, monitoring and attendance system.
Areas
NorthStar features in many areas, including GPS tracking, Web monitoring, safety, Webcam security and automatic attendance.
An ISO-certified International School
Saves time, maintenance and insurance costs
GPS tracking with NorthStar is allowing school bus fleet owners and schools to considerably lower their transport costs (by 10%-15%), by lowering fuel, maintenance, misuse and insurance costs, while simultaneously improving the goodwill and trust placed in them by the parents of the children who use their buses.
The Business Challenge
A typical school bus in a typical school travels an average of 60 to 90 km every day. In some larger cities and far-flung areas, buses may travel as much as 150 km every day.
Most bus routes are not optimized and the locations of stops they make to pick up or drop off children are not ideal. Often, the bus route timings are poorly planned, and cause delays and traffic jams. Chaotic traffic conditions and poor driving habits result in start-and-stop driving, which increases the wear-and-tear on the buses, and increases their maintenance costs.
School authorities & transporters are constantly trying to reduce the distance traveled by their buses, and thereby save maintenance costs. They are also trying to manage the bus route and stop timings better, so as to maximize their fleet usage and minimize the maintenance costs associated with idling and braking.
The Client
The client is a large chain of avant-garde schools in India. The school's buses ferry thousands of children every day, across hundreds of square kilometers in some of the densest and most unpredictable traffic in the country.
Their bus fleet management is outsourced to a 3rd party transporter, who charges the school a high, fixed monthly fee per to transport each child.
Introduction
School bus routes are often not planned at all, or are planned haphazardly or in an ad-hoc manner. Teachers in schools often play the roles of transport administrators. Sometimes, bus drivers or their supervisors play these roles. None of these individuals are qualified enough to plan bus routes and stops efficiently and optimally. This always results in the buses consuming more fuel and the school/parents paying more than necessary for transportation.
Additionally, unscrupulous drivers and transporters deviate off their designated routes to pick up unauthorized, adult passengers and some extra money on side. This behavior not only costs the school extra in fuel, but also costs the transporter extra on maintenance and also increases the safety risk of the children. Accidents that result from such behavior have an adverse impact on the insurance premiums paid by the owners of the buses. None of the individuals managing the bus fleets have the time and energy to focus on monitoring bus misuse or trip distances.
An integrated system is needed that can automatically track the distance traveled by the bus and the unauthorized stops made by the driver. To improve efficiency, a planning system is needed to plan the shortest, most efficient and optimal bus routes and locations of bus stops.
If the bus travels along an unauthorized route, travels more than expected or uses more fuel than usual, the school authorities & transporters need to be alerted.
Solution
NorthStar provides the ideal solution to the challenge. A combination of GPS and route/stop monitoring allows schools and transporters to track the distance traveled and unauthorized stoppages, while alerting them of exceptional conditions such as misuse and extraordinarily long distances.
Without tapping into the school bus' odometer, NorthStar is able to calculate the distance traveled by the bus to an accuracy of +/- 10 meters. NorthStar monitors the route taken by the bus, and the speed it travels on, and compares it against historical data to detect anomalies. If the school bus stops at an unauthorized location, authorized personnel are alerted immediately. If the school bus deviates off the designated route, authorized personnel are alerted immediately. NorthStar also correlates the distance traveled with the amount of fuel used. If there is a discrepancy, it appears in the MIS reports that are generated at the end of every day.
With the addition of a GPS tracking system, bus owners can ask for their insurance premiums to be reduced. Insurance companies will knock off several hundred rupees off an bus' insurance premium if they have access to the bus' tracking history, speed reports, etc.
But detection isn't the only way for schools to save fuel and transportation costs. They can use NorthStar to proactively plan their bus routes better, locate optimal bus stops and identify the best routes and stops that will use the least amount of fuel, or travel the shortest distance or fill every available seat on the bus.
NorthStar is scalable enough to handle thousands of concurrent routes and lakhs of concurrent stops.
NorthStar's web interface is available throughout school hours & is extremely simple to use & operate.
Its SMS notification mechanism is robust, extremely fast (under 45 seconds delivery of SMSs) & is not blocked by TRAI's DND/spam filters.
NorthStar's fuel sensors are simple enough to install and completely non-intrusive.