Datacom elevates employee parking in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Perth

Flexibility is at the heart of what Datacom does. That’s why, when it came to updating their parking situation, they were ready for an innovative solution. For this reason, they teamed up with us at Parkable – the Proptech company that helps clients revolutionise their parking through technology. Datacom themselves focus on designing, building and running IT systems for businesses. They are a leading company in the Australasia technology sphere.

Being an industry leader, Datacom prefers to keep abreast of all new technologies that can help its team reach new heights. They are constantly looking for creative ways to solve problems sustainably for their diverse and passionate team. With that, they wanted to update their parking system with Parkable in order to automate the process and save time for their staff.

One special part about Datacom’s implementation of Parkable is that they were able to switch to the new system almost simultaneously across all locations. This was particularly important to Chad Green, the group property and procurement manager at Datacom, as he aimed to operate the same system across all datacom sites. So, when it was showtime, Brisbane went live first and then Melbourne, Sydney and Perth all followed, going live on the same day. “We wanted to maintain consistency for our team across all locations,” says Chad. “This made the switch easy for the entire team and kept everyone on the same page.” Parkable helped keep things rolling smoothly throughout this transition.

Prior to partnering with us, Datacom was reliant on a manual parking system. As a result, employees used to have to self-coordinate and communicate their needs to reception. This took up a lot of time on both ends. Further, parking spots were only available to execs and the field tech teams, as Datacom had a greater number of staff than parks previously available.

Datacom was keen to eliminate this admin aspect, and Parkable did just that, saving everyone time throughout their day. By automating the parking process through their app, Parkable use means that the burden of parking coordination across Datacom locations no longer falls on reception.

On top of this, Datacom also wanted to promote public transit use in their staff through this transition. So they’ve decided to move away from providing more and more parking as they continue to grow across their locations. They hope to prioritise mixed mobility post-COVID and encourage staff to use more sustainable forms of transport to work. This means that it’s more important than ever that staff who need it have seamless access to parking spaces. No more fighting at reception over spots, or lack of! With Parkable’s solution, two bays are allocated to executives by role. These bays will be shared with an authorised user group of other senior execs, and there are two other bays for casual use among staff.

Datacom’s main goal in partnering with Parkable was to encourage staff to come back into the office and smooth out parking use amongst senior executives, smoothing out the experience and eliminating the prior back and forth with reception necessitated by the old system. They currently have 10 users in the parking group and 300 staff total in Sydney, so there are a lot of employees to be aware of! Therefore, it’s particularly important that the system is easy to use for all staff members.

Parkable also helped Datacom make better use of its existing parking facilities by distributing parking availability fairly amongst staff members. Amenities such as parking play a key role in encouraging staff to come back to the office, which improves the occupancy of their car parks. On location, there is a gate with open access during business hours. After-hours access is granted by Datacom swipe card. Kate Geddes, Group Facility Manager AU at Datacom and project leader for their partnership with Parkable, has given all eligible members access after hours on their swipe. Datacom has also elected to introduce Parkable’s Future Booking feature and plan to begin using Single Sign-on (SSO) as part of a project around Microsoft Integration in the future.

Transitioning from their old manual parking system has improved team efficiency. The program Implementation, change management and tech adoption all ran brilliantly, and all staff members now have fair access to car parks. Parkable has even helped Datacom change some of their car parks to visitor parking spots with our visitor parking feature, meaning that spots are adaptable to suit shifting company needs and welcome guests.

The thing is, though, at Parkable, we know each office is different – so each solution we propose is purpose-built to fit individual offices, their employees and their unique location needs.

For Datacom’s partnership, we emphasised simultaneously introducing the new system across all locations, automating the parking process and eliminating the admin hassle for reception and execs. We are pleased to share that Parkable has helped them achieve these goals. “The new system is everything we’d been hoping for,” says Chad. “Parkable has taken the stress out of getting to and from work, so that we can focus on why we’re there, instead.”