How one of the Australia’s largest car park operator, Secure Parking, is using intelligent cloud technologies to deliver a better customer experience. An application Development case study.
A secure, adaptable and scalable solution was needed to replace inefficient legacy platforms, increase productivity, improve customer experience and ready the business for future challenges and global rollout.
Secure Parking harnessed the power of IoT and cloud technologies to create a unique, reliable, secure, scalable and connected platform called Voyager, to drive efficiency and seamless customer experiences.
Voyager has been rolled out across 90+ car parks in Australia, with plans to expand globally. It provides Secure Parking with transformational business benefits including enhanced user experience, reduced costs, improved insights and streamlined processes.
Secure Parking is one of Australia’s largest parking operators. They offer a wide range of user-friendly facilities in all major Australian cities, as well as New Zealand.
Secure Parking aims to be the first choice in parking. As part of this vision, it had a goal to use technology to re-imagine the customer experience and drive operational efficiencies. Together, Brennan and Secure Parking are taking parking where no parking operator has been before.
Secure Parking partnered with Brennan to boost its customer experience and productivity by harnessing the power of IoT and cloud technologies and moving away from inefficient legacy platforms.
Together they developed Voyager, a unique, reliable, secure, scalable and connected platform to drive efficiency and seamless experiences for customers. While predominantly built for the Australian market, the platform also needed to be developed in a way that it could easily be adapted to be rolled out globally.
The aim was to build a unique, easy-to-use platform to manage 3,000+ devices across more than 90 car parks in Australia, including IoT edge controllers, entry and exit terminals, pay stations, boom gates, and roller doors.
Voyager was built to achieve a number of objectives for Secure Parking such as: replacing inefficient legacy platforms; increasing efficiency; boosting productivity; and improving the customer experience.
Parking Disconnected legacy systems had impacted the Secure Parking customer experience and the organisation knew that a complete CX transformation was needed.
For consumers, the previous Secure Parking experience involved getting a printed ticket on entry inside the car park and inserting it into a cash or card machine that punched the ticket on exit. It was clunky, time consuming, and didn’t recognise individuals or their vehicles.
Voyager also needed to feature environmental benefits such as removing paper tickets, printers and validators and support sustainable options for EV charging and smart city initiatives.
In addition, with rapid changes in how we work, travel and pay, Voyager also needed to be adaptable, scalable and transferable to enable Secure Parking to capitalise on new business opportunities, as well support integration with third-party software.
In short, Secure Parking sought a digital transformation that would drive competitiveness, enable innovation through new business streams and continue to deliver to the community.
Brennan’s experience in implementing successful large-scale transformation projects, combined with our deep Microsoft technical expertise, meant Secure Parking knew we were the obvious choice in helping to create Voyager.
Voyager is controlled by a fully integrated modern app, Asset Management Platform (AMP), designed and built by Brennan, which sits at the heart of Secure Parking’s business systems. Brennan also developed and fully integrated:
AMP provides front end enabling for Secure Parking staff to manage rates, products, promotions and all transactional activities, as well as 3,000+ devices through backend integration with IoT Hub.
Secure Parking can securely onboard and connect new IoT devices, update device twins and manage firmware through AMP interfaces without needing to login or understand the backend.
The custom Booking API module ensures that entries are validated, and exits are managed using business rules in AMP, on or offline.
A holistic view of the IoT fleet is available through a central portal.
Since going live, Voyager has been providing transformational business benefits for Secure Parking, including an enhanced user experience, reduced costs, improved insights and streamlined processes.
Secure Parking can now securely onboard and connect new IoT devices, and has centralised management and configuration of assets, products, rates, contracts and billing.
For customers, Voyager allows for a consistent Digital customer experience across all Voyager car parks, that is now ticketless and contactless. It is a low touch, personalised experience via mobile apps and websites, providing a PIN number or QR Code to drive in and out of car parks quickly, and with a choice of payment options that best works for the individual.
The ongoing strategic partnership between Brennan and Secure Parking has helped to transform the business from a bricks-and-mortar organisation to a tech-focused company across the full Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Secure Parking CIO Rick Chandra explains: “Imagine the customer experience being very consistent across every one of our car parks. It becomes exponential in terms of the value that brings to customers. No matter the site you go to in Australia, it’s that same, consistent customer experience that you get across every one. With Brennan and Voyager, we have the ability to control our own destiny, differentiate a lot faster through innovation and take new initiatives to market a lot quicker.”