Expo Parking

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Our client was the Expo Tel Aviv - International Convention Center, who was looking for a solution for their parking access management system.

Introduction:

The Expo Tel Aviv—a fairground complex used as a venue for international exhibitions, trade shows, cultural events, and conferences and receiving up to 2.5 million visitors per year—was looking for an efficient software solution to control and monitor the access to and payment for their parking areas in a fully automated manner.

Guest vehicles that do not have to pay for entry are automatically allowed entry/exit. These include the following categories:

  • Organizer and transportation delivery vehicles - those working within the framework of an event (exhibition, fair, conference, etc.).
  • Tenants' vehicles - those who rent office spaces at the Expo Tel Aviv.
Each organization is given a quota for the number of vehicles and entrances/exits allowed per day, month, etc.
The Challenge:

The client already had several systems in place at each of their parking area accesses, including license plate recognition, ticket issuance, and card payment processing abilities.

The client now desired a customized online system that would distinguish between different types of vehicles in order to automatically grant access free of charge (i.e., tenants and those working within the framework of an event) as well as keep track of monthly use and quotas for other organizations.

As such, the plan going forward was to develop a parking access CRM that could manage all of these processes as well as integrate with the Expo’s existing CRM and HTS.

Solution:

The first step was to design a system that could distinguish between different categories of vehicles/visitors—specifically, those who only enter to work a specific event (event organizers and transport delivery drivers) and those who enter on a regular, longer-term basis (tenant vehicles). This process required a robust algorithm that could recognize different visitor categories and their quotas.

It was also necessary to carefully design an interface that was simple and user-friendly and that provided managers with a full access control list (ACL), user roles, and permissions to ensure they could effectively manage their organization’s quotas.

Throughout the development process, the team regularly met with Expo administration, event organizers, and tenants to get their input regarding the look and feel as well as the functionality of the system’s UX design. The quality assurance team also conducted rigorous testing to eliminate bugs and ensure the security of the product.

The results:

The final deliverable to the client was a robust, scalable, user-friendly, and secure vehicle access CRM which included the following key features.

User accesses and roles:
The CRM system included eight different user roles (Super Admin, Admin, Event Organizer, Conference Organizer, Exhibitor, Admin Tenant, Company Tenant, and Security Guard), each with different access and functionalities according to their needs and permissions. The dashboards created for each different type of user were intended to be both mobile and user friendly and provide smooth access to information at any time and on different devices.

Vehicle/visitor recognition:
The parking access CRM system is able to identify the type of vehicle/visitor currently at any parking entrance gate via interactions with the HTS’s Vehicle Recognition System (VRS). In less than one second, the CRM processes the plate information and opens the corresponding gate if entry/exit to the Expo area is allowed for this person.

Entry/vehicle quotas:
The parking access CRM determines how often and on what days each vehicle may enter/exit the Expo grounds, depending on the type of visitor (Regular Guest with subscription, Regular Guest without subscription, One-Day guest) and pre-established company or organization quotas.

Report capabilities:
Parking access CRM dashboard users can generate reports from different time periods (one day, weeks, months, quarters, or years) compiling vehicle entry/exit data, as permitted according to their user type. All reports can be downloaded (as an Excel file) from the user dashboard.

Financial reports compiling entry/exit data for each company by guest in a single document may also be generated in order to easily bill clients. In the event a company exceeds the established quota of entries/vehicles, the report will indicate how much the company has exceeded and the amount extra required to pay.

Communication with validators:
As an additional control/security measure, the parking access CRM is able to receive data from validator devices located at each entrance in the event that a guest seeking access was not previously added to the system. The information for that guest is then collected from this device by the parking access system and included in the reports.

Communication with CRM Expo Tel Aviv:
The CRM parking access management system is integrated with the larger CRM Expo Tel Aviv. As a result, the parking access CRM is updated every fifteen minutes with new Expo events or changes to existing ones.