“It’s unbelievable how much you don’t know about the game you’ve been playing all your life.”
– Mickey Mantle
Baseball isn’t the only business that’s dramatically changed because of analytics. Everywhere you look, entire industries are forever becoming altered because of the new information that’s been hiding in plain sight.
The rise of better-connected hardware and technology brings an added perspective, so when we take a closer look, often new patterns emerge. And thus, we can make more informed decisions to either maximize performance or see “the truth” behind what’s happening in an operation.
Within the parking industry, data analytics are reshaping our business as well. In fact, with so many variables —time, frequency, revenue, occupancy, types of parkers—you can slice the numbers finer than a set of Ginsu knives.
The insights garnered from the data are game-changing and have the potential to play a pivotal role in maximizing revenue. Simply put, having a clearer understanding of exactly how your garage operates translates into staffing decisions, pricing strategies or maximizing occupancy.
A picture of data is worth a thousand numbers.
Capturing the data is the first step, but the real key is creating a visual display that helps you really understand what otherwise looks like seemingly random or chaotic traffic and transaction patterns of a parking garage.
SP+’s Revenue Analytics Dashboard does exactly that. The new dashboard tool leverages the transaction data right from the parking control equipment, thus giving data displayed in real time down to the hour.
It makes it easy for the SP+ analytics and operations teams to uncover patterns, relationships, and correlations in the data. And with that knowledge, they can then start to formulate the right questions about the operation.
Unlocking the potential.
“Having the data available and being able to parse it in multiple ways is only half the battle,” says Anamaria Spiteri, National Accounts Manager for SP+. “It’s the insights you gain from the data that matter, knowing what questions to ask and then making operational adjustments.”
The dashboard provides multiple ways to visually understand data points, such as usage by day, week or year, occupancy averages and peak times, generated revenues or tickets by space per day or average duration of ticket and parker type.
Exponential effects for national clients.
For a company that owns multiple parking assets, the value becomes exponential in terms of maximizing operations and revenue across a portfolio. Cross-referencing locations and taking a look at the portfolio as a whole can have tremendous value to a national or regional business.
With more and more transactional data becoming digital, there is an endless amount we can learn from behavior and analytics. It can start to point the way for the development of new tools, new ways to understand mobility and better ways to make things more efficient for everyone.
We think this is just the beginning.
