Garden City Public Schools' Transportation Director on modernizing maintenance operations for better efficiency

As Transportation Director at Garden City Public Schools (GCPS), I oversee 50 routes that transport 2,000 students across more than 900 square miles every school day. In my role, I'm used to keeping an eye on all of the risks you might expect—safe driving, bad weather, road conditions on our routes. Early on, however, I also realized there's another risk that many people overlook: paper-based operations. 

At GCPS, our bus maintenance relied heavily on pen and paper. We entered data manually into fragmented legacy systems. This approach created serious financial strain and constant reactive firefighting that left our staff feeling overworked and exhausted. 

One of the most dangerous phrases in operations is "we do it this way because we've always done it this way." When your organization thinks like this, you end up wasting valuable time on tedious, outdated processes instead of questioning why you’re doing them in the first place. I knew there had to be a better solution. 

We ripped off the band-aid and fully digitized our fleet and maintenance operations with a connected platform. But, even if you’re not ready for a full overhaul, there’s still a lot you can do with digital tools. Here are three ways you can modernize your maintenance operations and regain control. 

1. If there's a process, digitize it

This is simple, but it's worth saying: If you're still using pen and paper for anything in your operations, stop. Paper is where efficiency dies.

In our old system, drivers filled out a week's worth of DVIRs on a single sheet of paper. Our drivers are human, and it's very difficult to remember every issue from a week of driving. Errors would inevitably slip in. 

To solve for this, we digitized the process so that drivers now use an app on their phones to take required photos of defects to prove they actually walked around the vehicle. 

At first, some drivers had reservations about the new technology—for example, worrying about using their own cell phone data. However, they quickly embraced the digital process once they realized how much faster and easier it is. What used to take a day and a half now takes minutes, and we save 12 hours of administrative time every week. 

2. Bridge the communication gap with connected tools

Paper is also guaranteed to degrade communication across your team. Before digital DVIRs, our drivers would physically give paper DVIRs to a secretary. Whenever the secretary had time, between doing accounts payable and other tasks, they would manually create a work order. 

Often, we couldn't read a driver's handwriting, papers got lost, and mechanics would just wait for an issue to pop up. I’d estimate that almost 50% of maintenance issues fell through the cracks due to bad communication.

Digitization removes the middleman and creates a seamless feedback loop. Now, when a driver logs a defect on their phone, it's instantly routed to the mechanics. A mechanic can then immediately radio the driver to pull into a specific bay, streamlining the triage process. 

When your frontline workers can communicate with your shop in real-time, you take control of the workflow rather than letting the workflow control you.

3. Use data to shift from reactive to preventative maintenance

When you don't have visibility into maintenance status of your vehicles, you're forced into always playing catch up. Operating reactively is exhausting and expensive.

In our paper days, preventative maintenance was virtually non-existent. It was up to the driver to check their mileage and tell a mechanic when they were within 500 miles of an oil change—which meant buses regularly went 2,000 or 3,000 miles over their service intervals.

Today, the Samsara platform tracks our odometers automatically and pushes preventative maintenance alerts directly to the shop. Mechanics can consolidate repairs—fixing a wiper blade, addressing a check engine light, and doing an oil change—all at once, drastically reducing the number of times a single asset has to visit the shop. Overall, we’ve improved our vehicle uptime by 20%.

This proactive approach doesn't just improve vehicle health, it also boosts employee morale. Recently, I was interviewing to hire a new head mechanic, a role that is incredibly hard to fill in the public sector. I sat him down and showed him our digital maintenance platform. The ease of use and control it offered is exactly what convinced him to take the job.

Nobody wants to be bogged down by broken systems. When you give your team modern tools, it's a massive recruiting and retention advantage

Digital tools bring real impact, fast

Digitization isn’t just a buzzword—it pays real dividends. By modernizing our operations with Samsara, we were able to build trust, support our employees, save taxpayer dollars, and ultimately keep our communities safer. If you're willing to step out of the "we've always done it this way" mindset, the results will speak for themselves.