Zonar - Technical Innovation of the Year

Company: Zonar, Seattle, WA
Company Description: Founded in 2001, Zonar has pioneered smart fleet management solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit and commercial trucking industries. Zonar helps fleets of all sizes maximize the use of their assets with solutions dedicated to improving compliance, efficiency, maintenance, ridership visibility, safety and tracking.
Nomination Category: Company / Organization Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Technical Innovation of the Year - At Organizations With Up to 1,000 Employees

Nomination Title: The Next-Generation of School Bus Tracking – Getting Kids to and from School Safely

Zonar is the leader in smart fleet management solutions throughout vocational, pupil, mass transit and commercial trucking industries. Now in its 20th year, Zonar has proven to be an innovative trailblazer in these industries. Since its 2001 founding, Zonar has consistently met its mission to increase the safety, performance and success of its customers by transforming the access to ground-breaking data and insights for commercial fleets worldwide, helping customers to enhance compliance, efficiency, maintenance, ridership visibility and tracking.

Safety has always been Zonar’s primary goal, and its solutions reflect that. For example, Zonar’s pupil transportation technologies, such as Z Pass, help monitor students’ locations and give parents nationwide peace of mind. Additionally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Zonar’s electronic verified inspection reporting (EVIR) technology has ensured that each bus is clean, allowing for a safe bus ride experience as students return to school.

In commercial fleets, Zonar OTAir enables remote engine updates, eliminating in-person maintenance appointments and reducing the risk of contracting COVID-19. Additionally, Zonar Coach corrects driver behavior and ensures safety on the road for all.

These are just a few of the several tools Zonar provides customers to guarantee safety, compliance with industry regulations and overall efficiency.

School buses remain the safest way for students to get to and from school. However, school districts face numerous challenges when it comes to ensuring that student travel is efficient, safe and secure. School bus driver shortages mean districts are hiring less experienced individuals, resulting in a surge of late bus arrivals. This trickle down, though it may seem innocent, causes a significant increase, approximately 90%, in dispatch inbound calls from parents asking about a school bus location and estimated time of arrival.

However, in June 2020, Zonar shifted this pattern by introducing Zonar MyView to its pupil transportation solutions. MyView is a mobile app that provides insights on details and location information of school buses enroute to and from schools. MyView brings peace of mind to parents, who can use the app to see where their child’s school bus is located.

MyView when paired with Z Pass captures ridership data through a Zonar-issued RFID card. Students scan their cards as they enter and exit the bus. The scan captures the exact time, location and bus number. Parents then receive instant alerts of when and where their child boarded and exited the bus. With MyView, parents now have accessible, instantaneous data at their fingertips and no longer need to worry about where the bus is, if it’s running late, or if they missed it. MyView’s back-end dispatcher portal enables school districts to communicate any bus changes, delays or breakdowns directly to parents’ phones.

For most American families, the school bus is the only way their children get to school. Zonar MyView gives parents confidence in sending their children to school via bus, especially as schools begin to reopen amid the pandemic. Because safety plays a huge role in transporting children to and from school, parents need the most up-to-date information on their child’s bus status.

MyView stands apart from the competition with its easy implementation. Traditional route-based applications require a third-party routing provider to set up and can be difficult to forecast. This results in inaccurate routing systems and lack of ETA notifications. Instead, MyView uses proximity-based information pulled directly from each bus’s Zonar V4 TCU. This makes MyView a more accurate method of tracking and easy to implement. MyView also includes Rapid Response Rate, increasing the ping rate to every 10 seconds. The faster the ping rate, the more up-to-date information the parents and districts receive.

Zonar creates all its technologies with safety as the utmost priority. As such, MyView has security capabilities that outweigh those of competitors. First, to set up MyView, parents or guardians go through a multi-step process. The school district sends them an access code to enter, and they must also enter their child’s unique district ID. Within the app, parent information is locked and password protected to prevent unauthorized users from opening the app and viewing the child’s bus information.
Zonar has often been recognized for its transportation technology, particularly for school buses. In fact, in October 2020, Zonar MyView was awarded the “Most Innovative App” at School Transportation News’ Bus Technology Summit. Zonar’s apps were recognized over 24 sponsors that showcased the latest school bus technology, and Zonar won the industry vote by more than 1,250 Bus Technology Summit participants.

Zonar is well-known for being a problem-solver in the pupil transportation industry, and its technology has been present to combat challenges that arise in crucial points in time. This success is not lost on industry leaders. For instance, Christopher Dean, business intelligence and analytics coordinator at Dean Transportation and Dean Trailways, saw theimpact MyView had on pupil transportation: "We understand the challenges parents and caregivers face in making sure children are where they need to be at the right time. Schedule changes and even vehicle substitutions can cause very real problems. We anticipate that Zonar MyView will be an outstanding tool to ensure dispatchers can communicate clearly and quickly to parents. This will give parents peace of mind while improving the effectiveness of proactive communication."

Industry leaders, parents and school districts alike realize that MyView is a gamechanger in the industry, giving parents and school districts a sense of security in a time that feels insecure. This is just one of the many solutions Zonar has developed to keep children safe as they take the bus to school, and it will certainly not be the last.