Over the years, how software is used by businesses has radically changed. Gone are the days when businesses spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy the software packages, and then another hundreds of thousands to implement them as well as costly ongoing maintenance. Only to realize within couple of years their software has become obsolete. Compounding the problem now is the rapid digitalization of various functions of the business, along with the rapidly changing business models to stay competitive and meet their customers’ changing expectations. In this digital world, making costly capital investments to own software makes no prudent business sense anymore.

Using software as a service, or “SaaS”, makes businesses more agile. It shifts the responsibility to the software service provider to keep their software up-to-date to meet the evolving needs of the business. But the success of these SaaS solutions depends on how closely they track the specific industry needs. Are they built ground up keeping the specific industry vertical in mind? Do they help digitalize the specific industry business processes? Further, how seamlessly they work together?

The cloud-based software SaaS has become particularly popular in the parking industry. Parking asset owners from universities to municipalities to private operators and everyone in between now need an extensive array of parking technologies. Each organization has its own unique needs, goals, and requirements for serving their patrons. An excellent way to do this is through a SaaS platform built ground up, for the parking industry, that allows them to identify the solutions they need, and incorporate them into one platform.

Parking vertical SaaS solutions offer a number of benefits that are particularly useful in today’s environment:

• Fitting hand in glove with the needs of the parking industry end-to-end operations.
• Ability to pick and choose and customize the solutions that are right for the operations and meet the unique needs of the customers they serve.
• Reduced costs due to minimal hardware needs such as cameras, equipment, and hardware, as well as software installation expenses common in previous technologies.
• Flexibility to implement solutions on a “pay as you go” with no long-term commitments.
• Scale up and down as business needs changes due to seasonality or other factors.
• Simple to understand and easy to use technologies, allowing parking staff to implement tasks and obtain and evaluate data to make the best decisions for the operation.
• Minimal maintenance required due to cloud-based platform with regular updates and fixes when needed.

ParkEngage implements innovative parking vertical SaaS solutions through a parking industry platform. With a number of years of parking industry experience, we have built parking solutions to digitalize virtually every aspect of the parking operation. We work with our clients to identify the technologies that work best for their end-to-end parking operation. In the next few blogs we would talk about the blueprint for digitalization of various processes involved in parking operations.

Check out our entire suite of solutions and contact us to set up a demo or a free trial!

The parking industry has been discussing the topic of Automatic License Plate Recognition (ALPR) for a very long time. The fundamental technology behind ALPR is the Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) and pattern recognition.

Artificial Intelligence and its potential real-world integration have also been anticipated and planned for in the computer industry for decades. Anecdotally, even Von Neumann, the father of modern computing, struggled with the idea of Artificial Intelligence. Many of the existing AI algorithms have existed for a while now. But only recently, after the power of computing has reached a real inflection point, with the advent of Cloud Computing and Smart Devices, some of these AI/ML algorithms are beginning to become feasible for real-world applications.

The same is true for the usage of ALPR technologies in the parking industry. It wasn’t long ago that even the best ALPR solutions were achieving around 80 percent accuracy in license plate recognition, and with a 20 percent error rate those solutions were barely usable. Only recently have innovative camera technologies been introduced to the market with 90-95% accuracy, thus making their usage more viable for the industry. Over time more sophistication in camera hardware will improve this accuracy even further.

However, all this technology comes at a high price. This makes it more difficult for an industry that has been impacted tremendously by the COVID crisis, as well as a community that has been traditionally very margin conscious, to invest in these technologies. Large capital investments required to implement these systems have been a big drag on the adoption rate of these technologies by the parking operators.

Now more than ever parking operators and owners are seeking solutions that come with very low, to no, upfront capital investments. They are looking for solutions that allow them to “pay as they go”. They want a technology pricing model that helps them to even monetize this additional operating expense, by passing along to the customer for their convenience of usage.

For today’s solution providers, it has become imperative that they offer what the industry desires. One such solution is the ALPR-based Virtual Permit Enforcement system from ParkEngage. This technology is run over a smart device but uses a very powerful and sophisticated pattern recognition tool, and proprietary permit matching algorithms, on the device. This makes the overall permit enforcement system nearly perfect and easy to use. And since expensive cameras are not needed, such a solution can be easily offered at no upfront cost, and at a truly transparent “pay as you go” price.

Contact us to learn more about how we can integrate this technology at your facilities!