Our visitor management system in the market place has brought us a lot of great opportunities to solve business problems and as introduced to new real-world challenges that we never imagined, like developing a parking app to solve the problem of the visitor as abusing free parking within communities.
The Free Parking Problem:
Our client Holland Christian Homes is a not-for-profit senior community located in Brampton, Ontario, Canada. It so happens to be situated across from a local college that charges students a significant parking fee for students that are on a budget. Their alternative was to park across the street in the seniors’ community parking. As you can imagine, this caused a big problem for our client that left actual visitors struggling to find parking.
The Parking App Solution and How It Works
MyLobby visitor management system has evolved into a car parking management system. It was utilized to resolve the issue by having visitors register at the front lobby and enter the details of the vehicle, make, colour and Licence plate number. This parking application will allow each visitor free parking for a predetermined set of hours.
Also, the security patrol officer is using the MyLobby backend as the parking enforcement app outfitted with a mobile device that will display which vehicles have registered for parking within the premise and tag any unregistered vehicles.
We had to make additional provisions on the parking app for employee vehicles so that they could not accidentally get tagged. The system allows us to register employees or members of Vehicle description on the back end of the visitor management system. Also, in the Vehicle Mobile display, the entries In Blue are labelled as a member. This Visual cue made it easier for patrol officers to identify these vehicles results not to be tagged or towed.
Extra features that we’ve added to make it easier for the patrol officer to view all the vehicles on their mobile device:
- Sort by alphanumeric order
- Display violated at the top of the list in red
- Dropdown menu change the display order
- Text message reminder of parking limit soon to be expiring
- Clear Data previous entries
Parking Management for other facilities
Our research shows that parking enforcement is a real problem for a host of facilities such as:
Shopping Centres – Locals using for a carpooling park lot. Creating a shortage of parking for actual patrons
Guest parking for Residential Building and other communities – making the process easier for guests
Commercial Building – wanting to capitalize on after-hours parking in the city
Replacement of street parking meters – Online payment from a mobile device Whether you’re looking to enforce unregistered vehicles or generate revenue to provide extra parking for your community, our parking application will assist you to make it easier for visitors and the facility managers as it generates a parking log. The best part about developing any application is learning from industry professionals deal with this sort of issue on a day-to-day or on a weekly basis. The question we like to ask is; if you had a magic wand to make any app to solve this problem, what is some of the functionality you would like to see in this parking management system? I want to invite Facility managers to leave your thoughts and ideas as to what you think would make a cool application. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the application, feel free to reach us at accounts@my-media.tv.