Q&A
Versatility for Total Transportation Fleet and Operations Management with Tyler Traversa
WRITTEN BY RYAN GRAY I
Ted Thien, Sr. VP & GM of Tyler Technologies Versatrans
n January, Tyler began shipping a new solution that it calls a “groundbreaking” school transportation management solution. Traversa, first announced
in October, essentially packages a host of different solutions into one core, Web-based package. Traversa includes functionality for fleet maintenance and work orders, routing, field trip and activity management, and AVL/ GPS-neutral vehicle and student tracking for transporters and parents alike. While Tyler will continue to service and develop Versa- trans “for the foreseeable future,” Traversa places more power in the hands of student transporters, with planned links to driver hours, payroll and more. Ted Tien, senior vice president and
GM of Tyler’s Versatrans solution, took us through the new product suite, which relies on GIS technology from Esri coupled with GPS-agnostic tracking technology. He calls Traversa “one of the most significant things Tyler has done in the transportation industry.”
STN: Is Traversa essentially a new brand-
ing of Tyler’s transportation capabilities? Ted Thien: It is. We did this specifically
because it is a completely new product. We spent a lot of time talking to transportation directors and bus contractors, trying to under- stand what they really wanted, reimagining what transportation software could be from the ground up. We’re looking at 2015 and 2016, where we think the market is going to be and what folks are planning for right now. Tis is really the first iteration of a holistic transportation management solution, which has been designed from the ground up to include functionality included from many dif- ferent disciplines: routing, fleet maintenance, activity trips, AVL all integrated into the core product. Tere are so many more things we can do … and one of those things is an electronic rollout sheet functionality, which becomes very simple to do once you have all of those core components of information and
46 School Transportation News March 2014
data and functionality in one product. STN: Where will the industry be in a
year or two? Thien: Tat’s a really good question, and
I wish I absolutely knew. But what we see happening is folks want more out of their solutions. If you roll the clock back 10 to 15 years ago, the concept of a digital map was born. Tings like Google maps and Yahoo maps have made digital mapping ubiquitous, and now people have an idea of what they can expect. Tey experience those same features now in their personal lives, for example using voice commands to cause a phone to navigate me anywhere I want to go. Tey are starting to ask questions, like: Why can’t I do that with my transportation software? Tose are the kinds of things we’re thinking about when we are adding features into Traversa. In order to do that, we had to start with a
completely different platform and approach it in a completely different way. Cloud comput- ing is huge. It’s a significant part of your per- sonal life, so how do we incorporate that into school transportation software? What’s the appropriate form of cloud computing to make available to the driver, to the transportation director, to Mom and Dad? And how do you do that, again, from a holistic approach?
STN: How did Tyler set out on this journey? Thien: What we started with was the idea
that mobile was going to be part of the design in from the beginning; it wasn’t going to be an afterthought. So once you have that un- derstanding, a lot of things become available to you because of what the mobile environ- ment brings. I’m not saying right now we’re going to have voice recognition for navigation or for routing in the next release of Traver- sa. But those are the things we’re thinking about as we design software and as we have designed the experience for the customer.
STN: Is Traversa going to eventually replace Versatrans?
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