Custom software reduced this client’s manual labor by roughly 6x. The client is a parking violation appeal processing company that handles parking ticket appeals for major car and truck fleet companies across the country.
The Problem
Our client manages and processes more than 100,000 parking summonses every year, storing the data in a Microsoft SQL Server database behind a Microsoft Access front end.
Their primary market is New York City, whose Department of Transportation maintains a website called NYCServ for looking up information on a specific summons. To process summonses and prepare them for court, the client’s staff had to search NYCServ manually — one ticket at a time — and transpose each record by hand into their Access application.
The Solution
Shortly after NYCServ released an API to its database, we developed an add-in for the client’s Microsoft Access program that communicates with NYCServ automatically. We also installed barcode scanners on their workstations, so staff can simply scan each ticket. With the summons ID captured from the barcode, the application calls the NYCServ API and imports the full summons data — no retyping required.
Results and Outcomes
- Significant labor reduction — Processes that previously took hours are completed in minutes (from roughly 3–4 hours down to about 15–30 minutes)
- Fewer errors — Eliminating manual data entry reduces typographical mistakes
- Less paper waste — Digital copies of the summonses are pulled directly from the API, removing the need for paper copies
Capabilities Demonstrated
- Business Process Improvement
- Business Process Improvement Assessment
- Business Process Automation (BPA) software development
- Custom 3rd-party software integration
- Cloud integration
Features
- RESTful API
- Barcode scanner
- 3rd-party integration
Technologies
- Visual Basic (VB)
- Microsoft Access
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Regular Expressions (RegEx)