The ParkEngage Inventory Management System allows you to manage your own reservable parking inventory for all channel partners in one platform. But how does this impact your existing partnerships, how does demand-based pricing work, and what are the benefits to your operation? Here are answers to just a few of our most frequently asked questions.

My company also sells reservations through other local businesses who sell to their customers.  Will the inventory system take this into account?

Absolutely. The ParkEngage Inventory Management System helps you to embrace the strengths of your reservation system and your aggregator partners. The system allows you to gain real-time control of your parking inventory, enabling you to work with other partners (hotels, restaurants, etc.) to sell the inventory that is still available.

How does the “demand-based pricing work”?

Demand-based pricing allows the system to raise and lower the prices at your parking facility based on rules that you specify relating to the level of demand at any given point of the day. You can set up your pricing levels to be lower during the times of day when the facility is less busy and demand is lower, and increase as demand increases.

Can I enable different pricing and inventory for different facilities, or do they all have to be the same?

The Inventory Management System enables you to have completely different pricing rules, demand pricing rules, and inventory levels for each facility in your portfolio.

How does this affect aggregators who are selling reservations for my facilities?

The Inventory Management System maintains your aggregators’ ability to sell reservations for your organization through your established agreement. It simply provides you with real-time control of your inventory, enabling you to gain better negotiating power, as well as make the channel sales flow more dynamic, thus making the relationship more profitable for you and your channel partners.

Consumer behaviors and expectations have considerably changed in recent years and will continue to do so at a rapid pace. It is essential that garage facilities be outfitted with the solutions that will enable them to continue to seamlessly improve their operations, integrate new technologies, and support their customers. With the rapidly evolving technologies, it is imperative that garage operators select solutions that utilize best of breed components, while making their technology solutions future proof.

As the parking, transportation, and mobility industry continues to see this rapid evolution of technologies, large parking technology vendors, alone, struggle to meet the needs of the industry. Many new, internet-based companies are innovating at a rapid pace and bringing products to the market, that the industry needs. Such products are excelling at meeting the requirements of rapidly changing customer demographics and the Smart Cities revolution.

This focus on specialization in specific technologies has made the coopetition among the vendors the new play in the industry. With the advent of the Cloud, parking solution providers are offering their services in the form of webservices. Typically offered as open standards based RESTful (REST) APIs, these webservices provide best of breed functions, and are assembled to provide full solutions, that are flexible, secure, and future proof.

For example, the Touchless Parking from ParkEngage seamlessly integrates with the webservices offered by the other technology providers, like the payment gateways, the off-the-shelf entry and exit gates, the PARCS systems, the vehicle detection systems, the LPRs and the security cameras, the third-party reservation providers, the aggregators, and any number of services provided by the other vendors.  Additionally, it offers a full set of its own APIs that enables the garage operators and other vendors to easily and seamlessly add the Touchless Parking functionality into their existing mobile and web-based applications, as well as other technology solutions, without the need to reinvent the wheel!

Systems assembled like this, with the open standards based secure APIs, bring the control over the technologies back to the garage operators, and untethers them from the monolithic, and often very expensive to maintain, legacy systems. Now as their needs change, operators can freely pick and choose and replace the technologies rapidly, with very low to often zero capital investments, and with no fear of obsolescence of their technology asset investments.