LSU Streamlines Processes with T2’s All-in-One System
Background
Louisiana State University, located in Baton Rouge, is the flagship university of the Pelican State. From championship-winning athletics to award-winning academic programs to cutting-edge research, LSU is known for excellence in many areas. However, LSU Parking & Transportation Services had fallen behind the times. The department was riddled with end-of-life equipment while operating out of an in-house-built system that failed to connect everything together.
Challenges
“We were dealing with end of life handhelds, we were dealing with an end of life gate system,” explained Laura Foster, Assistant Director – Financial Operations. With a quarter of the gates across LSU’s campus not functioning and an inability to find replacement parts, enforcement officers were spending their time sitting at the gates rather than writing citations, though their end-of-life handhelds would have made that challenging anyway. This made it much more difficult for LSU to keep the core of its campus secure, and it also led to a significant loss of revenue.
Additionally, LSU’s in-house-built parking management system did not connect the department’s various solutions – permit management, enforcement, PARCS, and meters – leaving Foster and team with manual processes, disconnects, and redundant information. “When the University made the decision to transition from the in-house-built system to an external system, we wanted to find something that would take all of our operations into one and would communicate.”
Solutions
LSU found that all-in-one system with T2. They implemented T2 Flex® software for permit management and enforcement, T2 FlexPort for online permit sales and citation payments, T2’s Mobile Enforcement App, and T2 Logan PARCS, all of which run on a single platform and integrate with one another and third-party systems seamlessly.
Flex serves as the epicenter for LSU’s parking operation. There they can manage and configure permits and monitor enforcement activity and citations. FlexPort provides Foster and team the ability to sell permits online through a dedicated web portal, “which is not something that we could have done with the prior system, so that’s a huge advantage.” These permits are fulfilled through T2’s PermitDirect solution. With PermitDirect, T2 partner WW&L takes the orders made through FlexPort and handles the printing and shipping of the credentials.
The Mobile Enforcement App enables LSU’s enforcement officers to easily perform permit lookups and issue citations from a smartphone, all while integrating seamlessly with Flex in real time. As far as access and revenue control, LSU installed T2 Logan PARCS hardware at 64 access points across several surface lots and two garages. Flex also serves as the back end system to manage these facilities and lanes.
Results
One of the biggest successes for LSU Parking & Transportation has simply been having working equipment. With enforcement officers able to actually conduct enforcement, rather than sitting at the broken gates, and staff no longer constantly focused on break/fix, LSU is “able to allow our employees to start doing what they were originally hired to do,” Foster stated.
Additionally, T2 “has really helped us clean up our processes and just make things smoother,” Foster said. With all aspects of their operation now in a single system, it’s much easier for the Parking Services team to provide credentials to students, faculty, and staff, while enforcement officers have accurate, real-time information in their hands.
Manual processes like raising gates have also been streamlined. “Staff can push a button in our office and lift the gate, whereas before we would sometimes have to call an employee from our department to go physically to the gate to open the box to lift it,” Foster explained.
“It is a lot more seamless now than it ever has been before, so that’s our goal: to keep on creating automated processes that work.”
Laura Foster, Assistant Director – Financial Operations
Meanwhile, Flex’s robust reporting capabilities and seamless integrations have made reconciliation much easier for Foster and the business office. “We’re able to bill and not have to go and do a lot of research to make sure whether we charged or not, because the systems weren’t syncing.”
“It is a lot more seamless now than it ever has been before,” Foster stated, “so that’s our goal: to keep on creating automated processes that work, to allow us to function with the new requirements that we’re getting – because stuff is always changing – and to also make it seamless and easy for the customer, where they have the confidence on what they need to do when they are coming, regardless if it’s a visitor, student, faculty member, or just a unique situation.”
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