Assignment for A Business Plan

Objective One

Gain brand awareness among students and employees from Niagara College and University within three months.

The Plan:

· Hold a technology trade show in their campuses and introduce our products to students and employees

· Invite students and employees to experience our products and post their event pictures on Facebook homepage

· Interview students and employees about how they feel about our products after the trade show and broadcast the interview through local media

Objective Two

Develop a customized implementation plan within one month for each customer with maximum technology value but lowest possible cost.

The Plan:

· Inspect the layout of their parking lots in detail to determine the best allocation of technology equipments

· Work with their parking department to forecast the demand of clients in five years

· work close with suppliers to select the most valuable equipments and develop new equipments

Objective Three

Secure the first sale of Institutional License at the price of at least $10,000 for the first year.

The Plan:

· Launch an online poll on Facebook to ask students whether they would like their campus to install our products or not

· Set additional 30% buffer of bottom line price before negotiating the final price with customer institution

· Provide installation fee deduction for the first licenser.

Products and Services

Products

Smartphone Application

NCparker is a smartphone application aims to solve parking issues for customers so that they do not need to experience the pain of circling around the parking lot to find an available space. This is an real-time parking guidance application which enable drivers to find available parking space quickly and easily by indicating the location of available parking space on a map of certain parking lot. When there is multiple parking lots, this application shows the current occupancy status through different colors (red means full, yellow means a few space available, and green means lots of space available). Customers using this application can choose the parking lot they want to park, and the application will guide them to the map of selected parking lot with the occupancy status of each single parking space shown on the map (red means occupied and green means unoccupied). With the guidance of this application, users can make quick decision on where to park and go directly to the available space without hesitation.

Parking Analytic System

Parking analytic system is running for decoding signals collected from sensors into digital informations for easy reading. All information collected will be stored in this system, and only the administrator can get access to this database. Meanwhile, different managerial solutions are available for administrative users. They can choose different managerial solutions to analysis all those occupancy data of their parking lots. For example, every single time of parking duration for each parking spot is recorded through which you will have an idea about the average hours of one-time parking occupancy, and it also helps you to monitor the occupancy of 30 minutes visitor parking for controlling parking resource abuse and managing violator ticketing. Moreover, the administrator can access to a hourly occupancy rate report for separated parking lots through which they can analysis the peak time for parking occupation, and this will help them make some management decision to arrange their parking lots. On the other hand, this system is responsible for delivering real-time parking spot occupancy status to smartphone application clients.

Services

We provide installation service for all hardware facilities and system activation service for some installation fee. Equipment or system maintenance is free for our customers. Also, we offer discounted price for hardware upgrading in five years. As for the access of our parking analytic system and parking space guiding application, we provide two options for our customers. One is Institutional License and the other is Personal License. Institutions with Institutional License will have an administrator account to access to their parking analytic platform and use all managerial solutions to analysis their parking occupancy database. They will also have the right to management clients accounts, with which they can decide who can get free access to NCparker. The Institutional License is only available for institutions already have our hardware facilities installed, and the price varies from the size of total number of potential clients and the size of their parking lot. Meanwhile, Personal License is available for anyone, and it gives individuals without free access option to purchase access to the application for one-time fee of $0.99.

Appendix

How It Works

The key for the operation of this parking analytic system and smartphone application clients is the signal collection part which is achieved through vehicle detectors installed in every parking spot. Two sensor-based detectors are mostly used for monitoring the occupancy of parking space. Those sensors are ultrasonic sensor and geomagnetic sensor.

Ultrasonic Sensor. By measuring the time between sending ultrasonic waves and detecting reflected energy after it encounter obstacles to determine the distance between the sensor and obstacles. Once we know the speed of ultrasonic wave, we can decide whether there is a car according to the time difference. The ultrasonic sensor is easy to install and cheap, and it can be installed at different position according to the parking environment as the following shows:

On the other hand, the speed of ultrasonic wave varies from the air temperature, and it can be calculated as V = 331.5/s + (0.61 * temperature℃). Also, the air turbulence will affect the reflected energy.

Geomagnetic Sensor . The working mechanism of geomagnetic sensor is based on a physical phenomenon called Magnetoresistive Effect. When a ferromagnetic object shows up around the sensor, the Earth magnetic lines will bend with change in density, and the geomagnetic sensor can detecting this minor change on magnetic line, so it can determine whether there is a vehicle at the parking spot. The geomagnetic sensor will be installed on the middle of the parking spot surface. It is easy to install but relevant more expensive than ultrasonic sensors. Although the accuracy of geomagnetic signals might be affected by passing cars, it is easy to distinguish the difference. And geomagnetic sensor can work in most weather conditions.

Besides the sensors installed for every parking spot, a routing node works as a repeater will communicate the receiving the radio detecting signals from sensors and send those information to the gateway node. This process is working through wireless. And the routing node will be installed on streetlights with the supply of solar power. Besides, one routing node is responsible for collecting signals from 8 sensors. Moreover, the gateway node is a wireless mesh network coordinator, it can gather all detector data and report to the data center through LAN/WLAN/GPRS/3G. And one gateway node is responsible for gather detector data from about 30 routing nodes. And that is how the system gets all information.