SD Worx

Today, more than 63,000 large and small organisations across the globe rely on the more than 70 years of expertise that SD Worx has acquired. SD Worx is the co-founder of the Payroll Services Alliance, a global strategic network of leading payroll companies whose members jointly handle 32 million salary calculations.

As a growing organization, SD Worx once in a while gets confronted with some side-effects of their growth. One of these consequences is the shortage of parking space in the SD Worx parking area. As each parking spot is assigned to a specific employee, the remaining employees faced the daily challenge of finding a parking spot nearby, even though several of the assigned parking spots remained empty, because the ‘owner’ of this spot was on holiday, working from home or in an external meeting.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool which could manage the available parking spots on a daily basis”, this aspiration was heard more and more often as the number of ‘spot-less’ employees grew. So SD Worx’ IT management turned to a partner they considered capable of designing such a tool: icapps. They had also explicitly mentioned they prefered an RN-based solution, so they could witness first-hand what this brand new technology was capable of.

As it happened, icapps was actively exploring RN as a development tool. The first internal projects proceeded better than expected, so it was time to take this experience outside for the benefit of the customers. When SD Worx explained their needs and desired solution, this seemed the perfect opportunity.

Both teams found a perfect match for their aspirations, and they embarked together on this project involving brand-new technology, and resulting in an innovative solution for their business need: optimizing parking spot availability.

It took several cycles before the current version was reached. This was mainly due to diverging expectations from different actors, caused by the enthusiasm about the possibilities of such a tool. The current version is a solution which meets the requirements of all decision makers in this project.

The current app, aptly named ParkeerApp, is customized for several profiles. When logging in, the employee is using a profile determined by their company ID. In the ParkeerApp, they can indicate whether they own a parking spot or not. They can also customize their ID by indicating their favorite parking spots.

Employees can book or free up a parking spot for an entire day or for the first or second half of the day. The latest version also provides a solution for employees with assigned parking spots whose spot is taken by another car or an unexpected occurrence (a stray garbage container or other obstacle): they can apply for another spot, and - if their spot is taken by another car - identify the license plate of the ‘offender’.

Parking spots can be marked as available when the employee has taken a day off and agrees to his spot becoming available. And SD Worx has further optimized the parking spot availability by sending automatic push reminders to parking spot owners who haven’t shown up at the office yet. The owners’ commuting pattern is taken into account: when they haven’t departed from home within a set timespan after their usual departure time, they receive this automatic push reminder. This way, the system knows if they are still planning to come to the office, or if the spot can be made available to other employees.

When evaluating the tool, obviously the role of RN as a contributor to the tool’s success was studied very thoroughly. The overall impression was very positive. The development tool was ideal for the cross-platform environment SD Worx had envisioned from the start. The ‘develop once, deploy anywhere’ promise for iOS, Android, and the web environment was fully kept, which led to a considerable cost saving and shorter development cycle.

RN not only proved its worth in terms of cost-efficiency, but also in user-friendliness. The developed environment allows the end-user to access the software from the right device at the right moment: their smartphone at home or in the parking lot, the web version in the office.

This entire project has provided icapps with valuable feedback on several levels. On the one hand, they gained valuable experience in deploying RN-based development projects and the possibilities of this development platform. On the other hand, the solution itself was an interesting exercise in creating sustainable solutions to existing challenges, such as the optimization of the available parking space to reduce the burden of SD Worx cars in the neighboring roads.