City of Perth Parking Custom Software Development

About City of Perth

City of Perth Parking (CPP) is one of the top parking facility providers in Australia. It is a well-known leader in public parking in Western Australia with over 35 car park facilities and 20,000 off-street and on-street combined parking bays available for motorists.

CPP offers a range of services including parking infrastructure consultancy to assist business owners, as well as service and property management for property owners. This case study looks at how our app development company helped CPP with its workflow and data management.

Challenges

City of Perth Parking needed a custom software to increase efficiency and reduce the headaches associated with their outdated systems. Their previous systems lacked integration and real-time reporting, making it difficult to accurately monitor staff activity, equipment and the status of jobs on a day-to-day basis.

Coupled with the reliance on paper trails, this meant finding information and adding them to different databases was time-consuming and labour-intensive.

They also needed the app to be integrated with their Datapark System which processes and displays bay availability and vehicle count. With this integration, CPP wanted to improve overall workflow efficiency, process the number of available parking bays and display this information on their website.

Solution

Based on their unique requirements, Lateral’s app developers came up with CPAMS (Car Park Activity Management System) to resolve CPP’s workflow and efficiency issues, enabling:

Employees to login to the CPAMS app wherever they are. They are able to create and view the status of a job, all in real-time.
Management to accurately view job statuses, manage assets, stock and see real-time costing reports directly through the app without collaborating information between multiple systems and paperwork.
CPP to focus on the core aspects of their role and significantly reduce the turnaround times on jobs and total costs.

Our custom software solution, CPAMS, uses Virtuoso, a database engine and middleware that delivers generated XML files between machines. We integrated CPAMS with HANSEN, a machine that consumes and outputs XML files from a disk. It 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 is used to integrate the three systems (CPAMS, HANSEN and Datapark) so the required information can flow between them and be displayed as required. There are two data flows between Virtuoso components - CPAMS & HANSEN Integration and Datapark Bay Availability & Vehicle Count Integration.

Below is how we used custom software solutions to integrate the two systems so the required information can flow between them and be displayed as required.

On the CPAMS and HANSEN system, when the XML data feeds through HTTPS to the Virtuoso server, the files will be transferred and placed on one of three channels.
The Virtuoso user at the other end consumes and pulls the XML files off the queue and saves it to a disk.
In the Datapark system, the XML data is sent from one or more Virtuoso clients up to the server via HTTPS.
Messages in this queue are then converted to a JDBC SQL Update statement via a ‘dispatcher’ function.
The converted messages are subsequently applied to a MySQL server.
We’ve configured the City of Perth Parking website to fetch this data, which it uses to update the count of available car park bays.

Lateral sets up multiple channels in the Virtuoso server which creates multiple queues in the underlying ActiveMQ subsystem. These channels facilitate unidirectional or bidirectional communication between source and destination to ensure the data feed is flowing through without congestion.

Our Expert Take

Lateral developed CPAMS to extend CPP work processes through mobile technology to field staff to ensure that CPP provides its customers with the highest levels of service and efficiency all in real-time.

With our integration using Virtuoso, we also managed to create a system where the data can flow without disruption between the users so CPP can accurately display their car park bays availability in real-time.

The CPP project was a project that required “industrial strength” elements to ensure a robust system. The project was challenging but exciting to us as a bespoke software development company. It also shows the innovative nature of CPP. The level of integration and security required to connect with the City of Perth core business systems has been cutting edge. In fact, one of the central vendors made updates to its Finance Software to meet the progressive requirements for CPP. Those changes have now been incorporated into its product for all customers Australia wide.

City of Perth Parking