News
By: Jere Haapakoski
Customer and use case
Kalajoki City Parking Control
Project Schedule
17 Days + Further Development
The City of Kalajoki
Kalajoki City is a diverse tourism and business center located on the coast of the Gulf of Bothnia in Northern Ostrobothnia, known especially for its magnificent sand dunes and maritime atmosphere. Kalajoki offers excellent opportunities for holidays and living, especially in the summer, as well as for entrepreneurship. The city's sandy beaches and extensive tourism services attract tens of thousands of visitors annually to enjoy activities such as golf, water parks, adventure parks, and maritime hobbies.
Kalajoki also invests heavily in the development of business life and the attraction of new companies. The area has a functioning business cluster, the core of which includes, among other things, tourism, construction, and metal industry operators. Good transport connections, developing business services, and the city's vibrant and development-oriented attitude create excellent conditions for business growth.
Time before parking control
The city of Kalajoki has faced an ongoing issue for years, where the annual beach and event season attracts so many vehicles to the sand dunes that there are no longer enough parking spaces in the core area of the resort for all the vacationers. As a result, drivers have ended up parking along busy roads, on the dunes, and in the surrounding terrain. Cars parked along the roads have blocked traffic lanes, slowing down traffic, and in the worst-case scenario, have prevented emergency vehicles from reaching accident sites.
The sand dune area is known for its unique natural environment, which is why off-road parking, especially during the event season, has become a major issue. Cars parked in the forest have, in the worst cases, leaked oil into the terrain, blocked private forest roads, and spoiled the landscape for tourists hiking in the woods. The sand dunes and city's idyllic landscape are the city's biggest attraction for both Finnish and international tourists, which is why the city aims to protect its unique nature through parking control.
To this, Nive was able to offer a solution with the Nive Notis mobile application, which allows the city's parking inspectors to quickly and easily issue parking fines directly through the city's M-Files system.
Project Schedule
The Kalajoki parking control project was unique for Nive not only because the parking control use case had not even been considered as one of Notis' functionalities, but also because the project implementation schedule was extremely tight. Nive had only two and a half weeks to build a functional solution for Kalajoki's parking control needs before the upcoming midsummer festival. In addition to the Notis customization, Nive also had to build a new M-Files vault in the city's M-Files system. The city's M-Files system was configured to create a PDF document based on the observations made with Notis, from which a parking violation ticket was printed.
- – We started developing the parking control application together with Nive, as Nive's mobile application allows for simple data entry into the M-Files system. The city has built the billing process on top of the M-Files system, and Nive's mobile application made it possible to create an easy-to-use solution for parking inspectors to record parking violations and issue tickets, says Juha Matilainen, Kalajoki's IT Director. says Juha Matilainen , the IT Director of Kalajoki.
The development of Notis gained momentum quickly as soon as the city gave the project the green light. After the kickoff meeting held at the beginning of June, there were only 17 days until the midsummer launch-date. The solution had to include the following steps:
- Design and requirements specification (2 days): We worked closely with the city to review the parking control needs and key features. Additionally, internal planning meetings were held with the staff.
- Technical implementation (13 days): Customization of the Nive Notis solution, configuration of the M-Files vault and API's, design and printing of parking fines.
- Testing and deployment (2 days): We created a test plan and conducted application testing to ensure everything ran smoothly. The city's parking inspectors were given access to the app for testing during the project, but the official deployment took place only after the testing was completed.
Solution development
The actual design and implementation of the Notis user interface progressed quite smoothly as the project advanced. Nearly all features were already built-in and customizable in the M-Files admin, but the deployment of the app required that parking fines issued with Notis could also be printed.
Printing
The development of the printing feature was one of the most important tasks of the project. The printing feature had not been considered during the development phase of Notis, so there was no foundation or starting point for it in the app's code. Implementing this feature would have required not only coding but also more extensive application testing, which could not be accommodated within the tight schedule.
Due to the tight schedule, we decided to leverage M-Files' built-in printing feature instead of developing a printing function within Notis. Parking fines created in Notis were converted into PDF files in M-Files, which were then printed using an external printer. The issue that arose was that, for some reason, M-Files failed to recognize the external Bluetooth printer, so printing initially didn’t work. The solution was to use a dedicated app designed for external Bluetooth printers, which acted as an intermediary between M-Files and the printer. This approach was also adopted by Kalajoki, with the Notis printing feature being moved to the future development task list.
The printer used in the development-phase, and an early draft of a parking ticket
Results
As a result, Kalajoki received a reliable solution for parking control in under three weeks. Thanks to the seamless M-Files integration of Notis, the creation of parking fines became dynamic, fast, and easy. During the first weekend, some issues were noticed, but professional IT support was available almost immediately, allowing the problem to be resolved by the following Monday.
Nive wants to be an agile and reliable developer and supplier of enterprise information management solutions. We want to be involved in enabling the success of our customers.
- When I presented my idea and the timeline to Nive, the response was that it could be done despite the tight schedule. The solution allowed us to easily integrate the parking control process into our existing workflows. The development collaboration with Nive has been smooth, and there has always been a willingness to work together to solve any issues. Above all, we managed to complete the implementation on time, despite the tight schedule, says Juha Matilainen , the IT Director of Kalajoki.
Would you like to hear more about our solution for parking control? Feel free to reach out! or feel free to check out more use cases for Notis here!
Nive Notis
The Nive Notis reporting solution adapts to your needs. All observation types are configurable in the M-Files-system.