I still remember the first time I used a computer to write an essay. The blinking mouse cursor. The white canvas. The click of the letters on the keyboard. It was amazing to watch my fingers create sentences. Sentences to paragraphs. Paragraphs to pages. The ease of creating. No more pens and pencils. No more cursive lessons. It would soon be automated.

Automation surrounds us. It makes life easier. It takes repetitive or habitual tasks and alleviates the need for them. Automation leverages technology to reduce time and effort.

Look at coffee machines. They’ve come a long way to automate, well, coffee. Some models grind the beans, brew the cup, and dispense it directly into the pot–or mug–with the simple touch of a button. Some are set to automatic timers–and some even wake you up while automating the entire brew process.

Think about driving your car on the interstate. Before cruise control, you had to manually keep your speed by switching your foot between the gas pedal and the brake. Now with the touch of a button, you can automate your speed. Just set cruise control and the car’s technology takes care of the rest.

When it comes to making life easier, Passport strives to automate manual or repetitive processes with our enterprise citation management platform. We’re constantly innovating to make things run more efficiently.  Automation is more than just a technological upgrade, it’s a real advantage to your system. It helps parking enforcers cover more ground in the field and keeps office staff more productive.

Here are a few key ways that parking enforcement software can benefit from automated processes to help you better manage your parking locations:

• Reduce costs due to manual entry errors

It’s inevitable. Manual entry of data will create errors. It’s not a matter of when, but how many will be made. It’s no one’s fault. It happens. And parking isn’t alone. The healthcare industry was especially prone to manual entry errors from physician’s notes. Moving to electronic records helps reduce errors from a manual process and lowers costs associated with labor and correcting mistakes. Anytime you’ve written a manual data entry, it can create the problems over time. Moving to an automated and electronic system improves errors and the bottom line.

• Increase accountability

Software helps track each step in a process so it is easier to identify where breakdowns occur. It helps leave a trail of breadcrumbs so that when errors happen, you know where to focus. It isn’t as much about getting people in trouble, but more about gaining insight into your operations so that you can operate on an optimal level. Once you know where items are getting stuck, you can create solutions for improvement. Parking enforcement software helps increase accountability across the board. 

• Time Savings

Time is where automation really shines. In a manual system, every ticket that’s handwritten has to come back to the office where it is entered into the system. This creates an unnecessary step. By using a handheld mobile device, the data that is entered is automatically uploaded and stored. This saves a substantial amount of time by eliminating the manual entry of handwritten tickets and improves staff productivity.

Writing. Coffee. Cruise Control. And now parking enforcement software. Technology is helping automate processes so that your job–and life–is easier to manage. Take advantage of our beneficial software solutions today by scheduling a demo to see our platform in action.