Car Park Activity Management System

Car Park Activity Management System

About City of Perth Parking (CPP)

City of Perth Parking (CPP), is a leading parking facility provider in Australia with a strong presence in Western Australia. CPP boasts an impressive portfolio of over 35 car park facilities, offering a combined total of 20,000 off-street and on-street parking bays for motorists.

In addition to providing top-notch parking services, CPP also offers parking infrastructure consultancy for business owners and service and property management for property owners. This case study focuses on how our app development company helped CPP streamline its workflow and data management processes.

CPP faced challenges with their outdated systems, which lacked integration and real-time reporting capabilities. These limitations made it difficult for them to efficiently monitor staff activity, equipment, and job statuses on a day-to-day basis. The reliance on paper trails further exacerbated the problem, resulting in time-consuming and labour-intensive data entry and retrieval processes.

CPP also sought integration between their app and their Datapark System, which processes and displays parking bay availability and vehicle count. The goal was to improve overall workflow efficiency, process real-time parking bay availability information, and display it on their website.

Solution

To address these unique requirements, our app developers devised a custom software solution known as CPAMS (Car Park Activity Management System) for CPP. CPAMS aimed to resolve workflow and efficiency issues by enabling:

1. Employees log in to the CPAMS app from anywhere, allowing them to create and view job statuses in real time.
2. Management to accurately monitor job statuses, manage assets and stock, and access real-time costing reports directly through the app, eliminating the need for information collaboration across multiple systems and paperwork.
3. CPP to focus on their core responsibilities and significantly reduce job turnaround times and overall costs.
4. CPAMS, our custom software solution, utilises Virtuoso, a database engine and middleware that facilitates the exchange of generated XML files between machines. We integrated CPAMS with HANSEN, a machine that consumes and outputs XML files from a disk. HANSEN writes a file to the disk when it responds to a CPAMS Service Request or sends a Work Order to raise a job in CPAMS.

Virtuoso plays a crucial role in integrating the three systems (CPAMS, HANSEN, and Datapark) and enabling seamless information flow and display. Two data flows exist between Virtuoso components: CPAMS & HANSEN Integration and Datapark Bay Availability & Vehicle Count Integration.

Here's how our custom software solutions facilitate the integration between the systems and ensure smooth information flow:

1. In the CPAMS and HANSEN systems, XML data is transmitted via HTTPS to the Virtuoso server and placed on one of three channels.
2. The Virtuoso user at the receiving end consumes and retrieves the XML files from the queue, saving them to a disk.
3. In the Datapark system, XML data is sent from one or more Virtuoso clients to the server via HTTPS.
4. Messages in the queue are converted to a JDBC SQL Update statement through a 'dispatcher' function.
5. The converted messages are then applied to a MySQL server.
6. We have configured the City of Perth Parking website to fetch this data, which is used to update the count of available car park bays.

Result

Lateral has set up multiple channels in the Virtuoso server, creating multiple queues in the underlying ActiveMQ subsystem. These channels facilitate bidirectional communication between the source and destination, ensuring smooth data flow without congestion.

Through our collaboration with CPP, we successfully leveraged custom software solutions to integrate their systems, allowing for efficient workflow management, real-time reporting, and seamless data exchange.

For more information or to find out how Lateral can help develop an app for your business, get in touch with us today!