The increasing demand for parking spaces, smart parking services, and other technology-based parking facilities have resulted in the remarkable growth of the parking industry. There are a few global leaders in the parking industry who are instrumental in revolutionizing the parking industry. However, these companies did not start as global leaders, rather had humble beginnings who grew up to become global leaders with hard work, grit, determination, and commitment.
These global leaders, in the process, have put together well-knit success stories. In this blog, we have collated the success stories of some of the global leaders in the parking industry. Aspiring business enterprises who are looking to carve a niche for themselves in the parking industry can take inspiration from the following success stories. While the path may be the same as the leading companies, each business enterprise must define its own journey to success.
T2 Systems:
The company was founded in 1994 with a single goal i.e., to make parking better. Since its founding, the company has been a technology-based parking systems and services provider and has been deep-rooted in the evolution of the parking industry. T2 Systems began to integrate technology while the parking industry was still in a nascent state, which helped the company to provide seamless parking management, mobility, and transportation services.
It was this pioneering initiative that helped T2 Systems to establish a leadership position in the parking industry sooner than expected. Today, the company provides the most comprehensive solutions to manage transactions and leverage data to make informed decisions for efficient parking management. The company also has a strong track record of developing and deploying parking projects that generate high levels of revenue for the clients.
Cleverciti Systems:
Having founded in 2012, Cleverciti Systems is headquartered in Munich, Germany. The company was founded by Thomas Hohenacker and Korad Prinz-Dreher with a broad vision to elucidate and modernize parking systems. They aimed to achieve their goal with intelligent, ready-to-deploy integrated sensor systems that are designed to reduce traffic and environmental effect, solve parking searches, and comprehensively ease parking management.
From where it began in 2012, Cleverciti Systems now has 15 business verticals, 8 parking solutions, and 7 innovations in the parking industry. In 2017, EIT Digital named Cleverciti Systems as the best digital cities scale-up in all of Europe. Now, the company is the global leader in hi-tech and comprehensive solutions for outdoor and on-street parking services such as parking spot detection, monitoring, and guidance.
SKIDATA:
Gunther Walcher was the first person to develop printed ski tickets and a cash register for ski resorts, which marked the founding of SKIDATA in 1977. Two years later that company introduced the next generation cash register and coder 320 helping ease the sales of tickets. Later, in 1985 SKIDATA ventured into the parking management business and achieved its first success by equipping Apcoa parking facility in Vienna. Two years after its venture into parking systems, SKIDATA developed touch-free ski tickets by integrating RFID technology.
A few decades down the line SKIDATA impressed the world with its intuitively designed and highly functional access control equipment such as the Power.Gate, Lite.Gate, and Barrier.Gate in 2014. In the following years, the company began to garner awards and accolades in all its business avenues. Now, the company has more than 10,000 installations in more than 100 countries across the globe, and has more than 50,000 patents.
Robotic Parking Systems:
The US-based company was founded in 1994 and has been a pioneer in the development of a high-capacity and scalable automated parking garage. Robotic Parking Systems has reduced the required parking space by over 50%, which is a remarkable achievement. The company’s patented technology allows for speed and efficiency in parking management systems and has created opportunities for projects that require hundreds or even thousands of parking spaces to immensely benefit from the space-saving, safety, and environmental benefits.
With 26 years of rich experience in the automated parking system, the company has gone on to win two Guinness World Records for the Largest Automated Parking Facility in the world; one in 2013 and the other in 2018. Since its founding in 1994, the company has been responsible for many “industry firsts” in the automated parking industry such as:
- The first one to coin the term “Robotic Parking”
- The first one to build the first automated parking systems in the USA as well as the Middle East.
- The first one to build and deploy simultaneously operating robots for parking with independent three-axis motions.
- The first one to hold a Guinness World Record for “Largest Automated Parking Facility”, that too not just once but twice.
- The first one to build and deploy an original robotic parking and not a copy of someone else’s technology.
- The first one to be certified as the parking management company with the highest peak throughput in the industry.
SWARCO:
The Austrian company SWARCO was founded by Manfred Swarovski in 1969. SWARCO was initially founded as a glass bead factory, which was transformed into a world-leading company that provides products, systems, services, and turnkey solutions that offer safe and convenient traveling for all people on the move. Manfred Swarovski was enthusiastically spirited to live agile, innovate, trustfully cooperate and never hesitate to go the extra mile.
Now, the company is headquartered in Wattens, Austria, and has an international network of production facilities, offices, and business partners across the globe and on all continents. What was once started as a glass bead factory now offers one of the most comprehensive solutions for road marking, urban traffic management, signage, highway and tunnel management, parking, and public transport. In addition, SWARCO also helps connect vehicles with the road infrastructure, set up charging infrastructure, and offer holistic and modular solutions with value-added services that support the future of mobility and make city life convenient.
SIEMENS:
Having been founded in 1847, SIEMENS is one of the oldest companies in this list of leading parking management companies with more than 150 years of operations. SIEMENS was originally and still primarily is an electrification, automation, and digitalization company. It is also one of the world leaders in building energy-efficient and resource-saving technologies. The company has explored all possible avenues in the fields of electrification, automation, and digitalization resulting in a wide range of products and services including mobility.
SIEMENS is now a global powerhouse and generated a revenue of a whopping $97.4 billion for the financial year of 2020. It currently has a manpower of 385,000 the world over. Starting from 2005, the company has been honored with more than 100s of diversity-related awards across the globe. SIEMENS has an incredibly wide range of products, services, and turnkey solutions to offer such as:
- Infrastructure and Energy Solutions
- Automation
- Software for Industries
- Medical Diagnosis
- B2B Financial Solutions
- Rail Automation
- Wind Power Solutions
- Mobility and Parking Systems etc.
In the mobility and parking systems segment, SIEMENS offers one of the best parking management systems with its Intelligent Parking Solutions. This innovative parking solution uses the full potential of digitalization such as intelligent software, smart sensors, and intuitive analysis of the data. SIEMENS’ Intelligent Parking Solutions helps eliminate superfluous parking-related problems and optimize the use of urban parking facilities.
The company has also introduced a parking bay sensor, which uses ultra-low-power microwave-radar detecting technology. SIEMENS’ parking bay sensors are used to detect and record the start and end times of the parked vehicles.
FLOWBIRD:
The leading intelligent transportation and smart city solutions company was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in Paris, France. As the name FLOWBIRD suggests, the company was inspired by the effortlessness with which birds move within a cloud of birds in a quick and safe manner. Inspired by the free movement of the birds the company aims to make individual travel simple, safe, and fast while maximizing the efficiency of the collective travel by harmonizing the flow.
FLOWBIRD has been able to achieve its goal and provide better parking management systems for more than 40 years through various solutions such as kiosks, mobile payments, global connect technology, automatic fare collection, congestion reduction strategies, real-time data management, etc. FLOWBIRD has helped reduce air pollution, simplify payments, optimize traffic, and make cities economically dynamic and secure and thereby improve the living environment of more than 100 million users. The company also provides software that helps the local authorities to assess, supervise, and manage mobility within the city.
The parking industry, for the most part, has been unfortunately mistaken to be a low-income generating or less-thriving business. The success stories of these global leaders have proved wrong the misconceptions about the parking industry. Who would have thought that the parking industry had and still has such enormous scope to grow and evolve? Truth be told, given the largeness of the parking industry, it does provide a great scope and these conglomerates are an example of how much the parking industry has in store for aspiring business enterprises. Are you looking to make it big in the parking industry? Read through the success stories of these global leaders in the parking industry and draw inspiration to become one yourself.
