Taking technology to everyday lives! Date:   Friday , October 07, 2011 It is an era of retail boom. With malls and hyper markets mushrooming everywhere, people are inadvertently drawn to them but most malls in India do not have adequate parking facilities. Of the few who do, many operate inefficiently due to low ceiling heights, bad lighting, and single entry and exit points. This is the business opportunity N. Sathyanarayanan, Managing Director, Central Parking Services quickly spotted and drove into. In an exclusive with SmartTechie, he talks about founding the company, locating an unconventional opportunity and the big picture he looks to tap into. How has the journey for CPS been? In 2002 one of the leading developers in Bangalore looking to automate their parking lot; which was termed the largest parking lot in Bangalore, the Forum Mall parking lot. We bagged the opportunity. It became the first shopping mall in India with high-tech parking lot and it gave us a lot of visibility. This set the ball rolling as we started getting a lot of enquiries from other shopping malls and retail centers across the country. Since then we have done a lot of work for shopping centers in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, and many other cities. Around the same time, a lot of the Airports under the control of the Airport Authority of India were getting privatized and many new airport projects, like Bangalore and Hyderabad, were coming up. They were interested in making the parking at airports automated. That was a big opportunity for us and we started working in some of these projects. Simultaneously, some of the forward looking hospital chains were also trying to do something similar for the healthcare industry; thus we got into that as well. Today, as a company, we not only design, put together and operate parking lots, not just for airports, shopping centers and hospitals, but also for bus stands, metro stations, stand alone parking lots. Currently we have a presence in about 25 cities and a team of about 2500 people who specialize typically in parking lots. What are the key focuses in these verticals? One of the key focuses in these three verticals is how they can leverage technology. Technology comes into play in two counts. One is, in terms of protecting the revenue; if there is no technology implemented in parking lots it can bring down about 20 percent of the revenue. Second area is the convenience of the parkers; telling them where they can park. This is called as parking guidance systems or space availability display systems. What happens here is that if you have a multilevel parking lot, you look at the number of spaces that are available, and indicate this to a person who has come to park. What are some of the key challenges? One of the key requirements for a shopping center is that the parking has to be well laid; it needs to have the right technology, and needs to be well managed. There are many good malls which people avoid during busy days, because of the chaos in parking. Parking becomes the first and last point of the customer contact and that will be the experience that they carry home. This is a realization that most shopping malls have had, and they understand the importance of a well managed parking lot now. Still, in some parts of the country people are slow to adapt technology; the pain point is in making them aware of the necessity. How long will it take to deploy your solution? It can take between 3 – 6 months. We have to plan out the entire facility, track the traffic flows, ensure the technology that goes in, and get all the equipment that are used; many of them are imported. Typically, when it comes to fraud people are ingenious, and so we are trying to build in the best practices and a sort of Indian nuances to it, so we can protect and manage it parking lots.