The challenge
Parents called the school office whenever a bus was late, and the office had no way of knowing where any vehicle was. Boarding and alighting were not recorded, so confirming whether a child had boarded required contacting the driver directly.
What we did
We built a driver application with route assignment and RFID-based boarding capture, a parent application showing live vehicle position with arrival estimates, and automated notifications on boarding, alighting and delays. The driver app was built offline-first with attention to battery consumption, since it runs for the full route on inexpensive hardware.
The outcome
Location enquiry calls to school offices largely stopped. Boarding records gave the school an auditable answer to attendance questions, and route deviation alerts gave the operator visibility it previously lacked.