Artificial intelligence has accelerated all kinds of possibilities in the Digital Era and geared up for the betterment of the mankind. Dealing with automation and cashless transaction, Parkzap has brought a new ray of hope dealing with parking. Parkzap has transformed the parking experiences for operators and users. Speaking about this technology paradigm combining artificial intelligence, Cloud, Edge and Mobile ushers, leading to a revolution in experiencing parking operations, Co-Founder Pranay Sharma shares about his journey with The Optimist.
Every journey, which leads to revolutionizing of daily events, starts with a small piece of idea that has its roots with one’s daily experiences. Sharing on his journey, Pranay Sharma mentions, “We built a strong Research and Development (R&D) Department to explore this work from the scratch and bring a fruitful result that will revolutionize the parking experience. At Parkzap, we use advanced Vehicle recognition algorithm to detect multiple data points of a vehicle including the number plate, make & model, color. The multiple data points in combination provide an extremely high degree of accuracy. The information of the vehicle then can get validated to allow authenticated entry at a parking location. We are the first ones in the country to have integrated FASTAG in parking with all its security and validation features.
Journey during Pandemic:
“Parkzap, has the feature of going cashless and automated parking operations, which is very much needed at the time of physical distancing, because of the global pandemic. Also, from January 2021, Indian Government has mandated that all parked cars should have FASTAG in their vehicles. Thus, 90% of transactions will now be carried on through FASTAGs,” notifies Sharma.
When asked about Digital India, the advanced ways India is trying to adapt, the entrepreneur says, “Digital space will provide India a more convenient way of living. Before Covid, people in India could not imagine e-payment and handling cashless transactions along with online meetings and conferences, the way they do not. So, keeping in mind the need of the hour we have to create opportunities based on digital spaces, this will help us to use our resources to a large extent.”
Upholding innovation
In the post Covid world, we will be witnessing some significant changes in the consumer behavior. Considering the scenario of parking, consumers would prefer not to touch and retain paper tickets. Keeping in mind the upcoming change, Parkzap has designed the mechanism of touch-less parking, which will ensure that the vehicles pass through parking lanes smoothly with no need to stop and interact with staff. Parkzap has designed a solution to handle this by identifying a vehicle at entry and issuing an e-ticket that gets e-paid at the exit. Driver image capture option is there for additional security.
“Four years ago, when we started working with Parkzap, we found it hard to convince people to use FASTAGs and automated parking. But now with the advent of so many e-payment gateways and e-wallets like Google Pay, PhonePe which are now well-entrenched in the population, people are ready to accept using Parkzap and FASTAGs as they find it more convenient and time saving,” enthuses Sharma.
Parkzap has been designed to be easily integrated with other systems in operation, be it at a residential society (with visitor management system) or at a commercial space or at an office building (with ERP, revenue & HR systems).The open architecture provides secure authenticated APIs for data exchange with other applications in use. The controller is programmed to integrate with already installed hardware such as boom barriers, loop sensors, RFID readers and cameras. Parkzap dashboard is a highly visualized and interactive dashboard that provides summary and transaction level information on parking. This helps the parking owners in revenue generation as it helps them maintain transparency with the parking lot users. Owing to consumer preferences and Covid impact, Parkzap has enabled its consumers to pay via cashless methods without waiting at the exit queues and parking owners with revenue augmentation. This scalable and reusable architecture of the solution integrates with any existing hardware and software that has already been installed and has successfully made the users enjoy a hassle-free parking experience.
“Initially, we took feedback from the users and modified our process accordingly to make it more user-friendly,” informs Sharma.
Parkzap dashboard is a highly visualized & interactive dashboard that provides summary and transaction level information on parking. “This helps the parking owners for their revenue generation as it gives them to maintain transparency with the parking lot users” shares the entrepreneur.
Success and Future prospects:
With cashless and queue-less commercial parking, feature rich display, parking guidance and automated kiosks, Parkzap is successfully revolutionizing the parking experience. Speaking about this success, Sharma adds, “We are continuously striving to achieve more and are working on our future prospects of building a mechanism that would track speeding vehicles from the toll plazas.”
