School District of the City of Royal Oak MicroAnalytics Inc.
Andy Linell Mary Buchanan
Executive Director, Vice President Marketing and Sales
Business and Technology Services Phone: 703-841-0414
Phone: 248-435-8400 Ext. 214 Fax: 703-527-1693
Art Watson Mobile: 416-930-0246
Transportation Routing Supervisor e-mail: mary@bestroutes.com
Phone: 248-545-0709 Ext. 247
School Bus Routing Software Will Help Find New Friends for New Residents
Royal Oak, MI — September 9, 2005 — Art Watson, Routing Supervisor for the School District of the City of Royal Oak, Michigan has been using their BUSTOPS routing software in a novel way.
After moving to the City of Royal Oak days before the start of school, a young family inquired about bus transportation for their daughter, only to discover that they fell within the designated walking area to the nearest Elementary School.
“The parent was concerned that this was quite a distance for the little girl to walk, especially being new to the city,” said Art. With the parent’s authorization, Art offered to contact a few other parents of students in the same grade nearby in the walk area, giving them the family’s telephone number to contact if they wanted to help.
Later, it became known that the little girl now has some new friends to walk to school with. Everyone concerned thought this was a cute story. So Andy Linell, Executive Director, Business and Technology Services for Royal Oak Schools started to pass similar situations of walk area students where the parent voiced concern for the distance or other issues about the lack of bus service, on to Transportation department for similar help.
Art confessed that giving this service is not as much work as people think — comments like “You actually DO THIS!!” are met with a smile. It is very easy in his BUSTOPS Transportation software for him to pull up a list of other students nearby in the walk zone, using any criteria he wants, such as same grade and school as the little girl needing new friends.
Royal Oak Schools just installed the BUSTOPS software by MicroAnalytics in the spring. Art and his staff worked hard to get everything ready for school startup at the end of the summer. It was a tall order for Art, being his first year with responsibility for transportation routing and never having used routing software before. Despite all of the hard work, Art has found it to be a positive experience, “The more I get into this program, the more I enjoy it.”
MicroAnalytics has produced logistics software since 1984. The company helped pioneer the
development of PC based routing systems and is recognized as a leading software provider with over 2400 systems distributed worldwide. BUSTOPS is a school bus routing and management program that enables districts to conduct route and run optimization using individual time parameters. School district administrators can perform redistricting studies, boundary analysis and plan effectively for future needs.
In addition to BUSTOPS, MicroAnalytics publishes several other logistics software programs. TruckStops routing and scheduling software program for commercial distribution operations; OptiSite distribution planning and site location model; emSTOPS equipment maintenance system; etSTOPS extracurricular trip management system. The company operates offices in Arlington, Virginia, Toronto, Ontario and London, England. Agents in Europe, South America, South Africa, Chile, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore represent MicroAnalytics. For more information, contact us 703-841-0414 or at info@bestroutes.com. MicroAnalytics has web sites www.bestroutes.com, www.bustops.com.