GREENVILLE, S.C. – Datastream Systems, Inc. announced that FirstGroup America, a provider of transportation and fleet services, has deployed the Datastream 7i asset performance management solution across 400 sites in the United States. FirstGroup America has three divisions in the United States, including:

• First Vehicle Services, which provides management and maintenance services for more than 40,000 vehicles for municipal, state, and federal governments and private sector organizations.
  

• First Student, which provides school bus transportation services to more than one million students in 500 school systems.
  

• First Transit, which provides public transit contracting and management services to more than 100 transit authorities, departments of transportation, federal agencies, municipal organizations, and private companies.

  FirstGroup America is deploying Datastream 7i across all three of these divisions, encompassing 1,500 users across over 400 sites. FirstGroup America is using Datastream 7i to automate its management of nearly 80,000 vehicles, enabling the company to maximize fleet availability by scheduling preventive maintenance and tracking warranties. FirstGroup America anticipates increasing its productivity, by keeping its vehicles up and running, and reducing maintenance costs. In addition, FirstGroup America’s diverse customer base has a broad array of reporting and regulatory requirements. Datastream 7i’s fleet-management functionality automates the process of meeting these requirements. “Although our North American businesses have somewhat different requirements, they were unanimous in selecting Datastream 7i because it gives them a common platform from which to manage their assets,” said Joe Leturgez, vice president of information services of FirstGroup America. “Datastream 7i’s Web architecture allows anytime, anywhere access to our asset information, and the hosted solution greatly reduces our costs of delivering services.” FirstGroup America is deploying the Datastream 7i Web-architected asset management system as a hosted solution to achieve the lowest possible total cost of ownership. By choosing a hosted platform, deployment is quick and the cost of hardware equipment and the supporting staff is minimal. FirstGroup America will also have instant, online access to version updates.