The loading bay is often heavily congested with vehicles and can be an agonizing demand on a driver’s patience. This is not the case at Hong Kong’s leading convention and exhibition center thanks to DKSH’s advanced parking management solutions.
The center is a leading convention and exhibition venue in Hong Kong. With over 300,000 sqm gross area, the venue has hosted nearly 50,000 events and over 126 million visitors. Besides its purpose-built facilities for exhibitions, conventions, meetings, and banquets, the center features seven restaurants for all dining purposes.
Challenge
The major challenge for the center’s loading bay facilities was managing vehicle access for loading and unloading purposes. Event-related vehicles were previously checked manually with the center’s database and event management team to verify vehicle, vendor, supplier, and exhibitors’ information before being allowed entry to the loading bay.
Besides having valuable manpower deployed for these repetitive and non-value-added tasks, the vehicle registration procedure was inefficient, time-consuming, and could occasionally be inaccurate. At peak hours, this often resulted in congestion, chaos, and parking space assignment conflicts.
There was also a lack of a dedicated procedure to allow VIP vehicles smoother access to the venue as they were subjected to the same verification process at the parking entry, and this created annoyance and delays for the special guests entering the center.
Approach
This was the first time DKSH Technology had worked with the exhibition center’s management team. The key to the new system was having a customized single interface for all involved in managing and monitoring the parking system’s operations.
From managing vehicle profile creation, access control verification, and car plate recognition, the traditional manual process has now moved to a data-based automated process flow. Upon creating a profile for an event vehicle, including vehicle details, access period, and parking duration, the verification steps now only take three seconds at the parking gate arm. The camera captures the car plate, processes automatic recognition, verifies with the database, and grants authorized access.
The system was designed to enable better capacity planning and turnaround controls for the loading bay. With the ability to generate a summary report from the consolidated database, the center’s resources and loading areas are better optimized.
We designed a VIP car plates tool featuring automated alert notification and verification access to allow pre-registered vehicles to move faster through the entry gates. The system has further elevated the center’s meet-and-greet services.
Result
Our expertise in car park solutions helped the center to merge the parking management system, car plate recognition, and loading bay access control into one advanced and tailored interface. Working closely with our customer, we successfully turned the exhibition center’s loading bay area into an efficient, fully optimized, and more secure facility.
The loading area no longer requires fixed personnel stationed at the gate and there is no congestion even during peak hours. The system has heightened the bay’s security level and enabled resources to be allocated for more important security tasks within the building and premises.
Following the success of this project, the exhibition center’s management team is already planning to integrate its booking system to better manage visitors and use QR codes for guest booking and vehicle access.