Key performance indicators are helping fleet managers from Hawaii to Maine contain the total cost of school bus vehicle ownership
WRITTEN BY ERIC WOOLSON
“Tey were effectively on a very unsustainable track. Te leg-
islature decided it was time to put a stop to that and threatened to cease all non-special needs related transportation,” said Tim Ammon, chief of business development with the TransPar Group of Companies, who oversaw the project as the Hawaii DOE’s con- sultant. “You’ve got to be able to admit the problem. Te legisla- ture forced an admission of the problem.” Transportation directors across the country have identified
key performance indicators (KPIs) to improve their operations, including the cost of vehicle ownership and operation. In Ha- waii’s case, an inefficient route-contracting process contributed greatly to runaway spending. “We identified some savings in training, projecting costs and the use of technology, but the route contract component was a particu- larly troublesome piece,” Ammon said. “Tey essentially bought one route at a time and that failed to generate the kind of competition needed to control costs.” Te Hawaii DOE and Ammon’s team developed a pilot program
and worked more than a year to get at the biggest problem of route costs. In 2013, they moved from route purchasing to buying blocks of time. “Te new procurement method let us buy the use of a bus for four hours a day to do with it as we saw to be in the best interest of the state. If we needed a bus for more than four hours, we’d also pay for that,” Ammon recalled. “What it did was create a much greater degree of flexibility and how to structure routes, which allowed us to introduce efficiencies we could measure.” Te new approach was rolled out on Oahu in 2014, the big island of Hawaii in 2015 and most recently on Maui and Kauai. Te solution didn’t just contain annual expenditures; it reduced them from $78 million in 2012 to roughly $62 million in the most recent school year. “Tat’s a $16-million reduction in costs. If we are talking about
cost avoidance, that number would be much higher,” Ammon said. “Sometimes, it’s difficult for state programs to stick with short- term disruption for longer-term gain, but from the governor to the legislature through the board of education, superintendent, the people managing transportation and our bus contractors, they fo-
cused every day on what needed to be accomplished. Tey deserve a huge amount of credit for being willing to commit to the idea and doing what was necessary to execute on it.” Only slightly more than 27 percent of STN readers respond- ing to this month’s survey that touched on the topic say they currently use KPIs in their operations. But those who do named on-time/ride time and safety objectives at the top of the list, followed by such factors as hours/salaries, maintenance, cost per rider/mile and age of fleet. John Bagert, Tyler (Texas) Independent School District’s director of transportation, and Sam Bailey, transportation director of the Biloxi (Miss.) Public Schools, have been KPI disciples for decades. Lisa Gadway has been on the KPI bandwagon for 13 years, includ- ing her recent tenure as director of transportation of the South Portland (Maine) School Department. “Obviously, I have to do some reporting so I wanted to do some tracking based on those needs,” she said. “But I’m new to the dis- trict—I’ve been here two years—so I wanted to track some informa- tion that I needed, too.”
NOTHING NEW, BUT MIGHTY RESULTS “Metrics, measurements, benchmarks,
KPIs, call them what you want, I’ve been using them 40 years,” said Bagert, who cited his usage of KPIs during his 30 years as fleet manager of telecom giant Verizon’s national fleet man- ager before settling into the Tyler district in 2010. When he was with Verizon, Bagert recalled how he would benchmark against the fleet costs of other telecoms, but he added the the fleets managers often cooperated with each other to keep down costs as much as possible. “We were almost like a brother- hood,” he explained. “If we had problems with a particular vehicle model, we’d share information. We would always share whenever we could.” Today, Bagert’s KPIs are “those factors that I think are going to
have the biggest impact on the district.” He also keeps a spread- sheet with years of information at his fingertips.
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