Georgia College Streamlines Campus Parking and Transportation Using Custom Cloud App

College campuses everywhere rely on a vital function called “Auxiliary Services” to provide all the goods and services for a thriving quality of life on campus – from housing to transportation, dining to bookstores, and the list goes on. The Auxiliary Services department not only seeks to improve day-to-day campus life for students and faculty, it also can bring in additional revenue when managed well.

Today we’d like to share a customer success story that demonstrates how cloud technology can transform the quality and efficiency of Auxiliary Services for any size college.

Georgia College is a public liberal arts university in Milledgeville, Georgia. The Parking and Transportation department first introduced chartering services to the Athletics department in 2009 and since that time has experienced a 15-20% year-over-year increase in trip requests from the campus as a whole. The initial trip request system relied heavily on Microsoft Access and became increasingly inadequate to handle the growing transportation demands.

With a tight deadline and slew of issues to address in the existing system, Georgia College Parking and Transportation decided to start fresh.  After exploring several options, they chose Caspio for its ease of use, flexibility, scalability and competitive cost, and started working on the platform to create a new Vehicle and Trip Reservation (VTR) system.

Led by their senior manager Ryan Greene, the team created a new VTR system in just a few months and continued to expand the system throughout 2013 to include parking services, driver scheduling, and vehicle maintenance applications.

The new Caspio-powered application is entirely cloud-based and brings various transportation services together on the Georgia College website. Students and faculty members can now easily request availability and a price quote for a trip request and stay updated about the request status via the website and email.

Users also like the fact that they can see photos of the vehicles and assigned drivers. Additionally, the team implemented a feedback system using Caspio and later expanded it to cover other Auxiliary Services.

On the administrative side, the team manages all transportation programs in a centralized internal application providing real-time data about incoming requests, driver schedules, vehicle availability and maintenance, invoices, and more.

Ryan Greene, Senior Manager,
Parking and Transportation
Georgia College

“We like the ease-of-use and reliability of Caspio and the fact that we can easily make changes to an application at any time. The new system also made our internal processes more efficient, allowing departments to take on more requests with fewer additional costs.”

The new transportation, parking and maintenance system has received wide acclaim from both students and faculty, but more importantly, the entire communication and process flow for campus-wide transportation was greatly improved. As a result, Greene was invited to present his outstanding results using Caspio at the annual NACAS (National Association of College Auxiliary Services) conference.

Learn more about how Caspio serves the education industry and open a free trial to try it out for yourself.