In the Spotlight With TIBA

We recently spoke to Moshe David, CEO of TIBA to learn more about 'Engaged Parking'. We wanted to know how it came about, what it means and how it's reflected in what TIBA are currently working on. Moshe was able to tell us all about what the 'Engaged Parking Experience is and the wider impact on their company operations. 

Please Briefly Introduce Yourself and Tell Us About TIBA

"My name is Moshe David, I’ve been CEO at TIBA for the last three years since the beginning of 2016. Prior to TIBA in the last 20 years or so I’ve been managing and founded a few technology companies, mostly in the software space.  Different areas of software applications, clouds and IT and so on. I currently live in Israel but travel to the US and other parts of the world. I’ve also lived in the US and other parts of the world as well.

TIBA was founded about 31/32 years ago here in Israel and in the mid-90s entered the parking space; parking technology, and very quickly became the market leader in Israel. It’s a relatively small market but it’s very competitive so almost all of the big competitors that we see in other parts of the world, Europe, US, Asia and so on we meet them also here in Israel. We’ve been winning the market share here, currently we have about two-thirds to 70% of the market share here in Israel. About 11/12 years ago, TIBA decided to go into the US market and after a few years started to gain significant market success. We’ve built a very large network of dealers. Today TIBA has the largest network of resellers and integrated dealers in the North American market. Almost 40 of them covering almost every corner of North America. That’s our main market today.

I would say in the last four to five years, TIBA has seen significant acceleration in our business in changing our product portfolio, the mixture or composition of our customer (base) in size and so on".     

We’ve Seen the Buzz Words “Engaged Parking” Used By TIBA Many Times Recently, Can You Tell Us What This Is?

"When we went through an internal process to identify our strength, internal existing strength and trying to also define what type of a company we want to be. That reflection and process basically brought us to the slogan “Engaged Parking Experience”. It basically means how we want the slogan to reflect on TIBA, our relationship with our customers, our products and our partners because we are part of a broader ecosystem. This is an important statement. The engagement and experience in the parking ecosystem, almost every word here was carefully selected because it should reflect how we believe we are and how we believe we should behave in the market and what value we bring to the market. I’ll break it down to the two major words “Engaged” and “Experience”.  “Engaged” means how we at TIBA engage with our customers, primarily parking or real-estate owners and operators, but also our partners who are our resellers and integrators that work with us and definitely our employees as well. Today, probably more than any other company that operates in the North American market, we provide a high-touch to our customers, to our network of dealers which are local to their respective market so they know our local market and they know the local players and they serve locally in the market. Engagement also is how we want our customer to engage with their customer, basically the drivers. For example, how to help operators transform transient parkers into registered parkers? What additional benefits can they provide to those parkers, those drivers? Additional aspects are security, security which is sometimes perceived as a technical word specifically in the world of hackers and so on. If we want to be a trusted company and our customers want to engage with us, we need to make sure we are secure. That builds trust and enables us to better engage.

Engagement is also about how we want drivers to engage with the system, how fast the systems work and today we have probably have the fastest system out there by far when it comes to processing time. How fast can drivers come in and out of a parking facility, whether it’s with physical tickets or ticketless. What information is presented on the screen, whether touch or not. All of this is part of the word engagement. Overall what we want to provide our customers, or users, is the best and most positive frictionless and easy experience as possible. If we move onto “Experience”; first of all it’s about experience. We want to give the best and easiest experience from the moment we engage with a potential customer. How do we install the systems, how do we maintain the systems, how we support and operate the systems and eventually also the end-user experience. We have over 30years of hands-on experience in this industry and we are trying on the one hand to be at the cutting edge of technology, in that respect being that core Israeli company from the start-up nation, it’s relatively natural to build and introduce new technologies coming out of that specific market. Eventually that’s where it starts but it ends whether it is a TIBA project with a customer or with the dealer network but our philosophy is to have immediate, local reactivity to the customer and provide the best experience, support and personal touch.

So to summarise, we announced in the last few weeks, mostly in June the launch of a few products, actually almost every aspect of our product suite.  Hardware, service-side, software, application, all of it in-the-cloud, all of it built for high, fast, secure performance and so on. These products were all built while looking and thinking 'how can we better engage with our direct customers and their customers?' That’s how we built the products and the philosophy behind it".

Can You Tell Us a Little About the X60 Hardware Family?

"I’ll give a couple of examples about how the philosophy of engagement is reflected in the products. I’ll start from inside out, as I mentioned earlier when one of our customers decides to buy a system, they would like it to be installed as quickly as possible with as few interference in their operations as possible and it to work from day one with no issues and no hassle. We’ve invested a lot in simplyfing and optimising the inside part of our systems and today, if you were to open an Iphone or any smartphone product, you’ll see the cables and the directions of the screws and so on. Our philosophy is very similar but with one big difference. We know that at some point our systems will be opened, whether for the initial installation or later, maybe to add or replace paper or to fix a broken component so the way we have built them is in a way that is easy and will simplify and shorten the time to install, operate and fix any potential problem with any component in the system. If you open them, each component can be easily replaced in a few minutes. You do not need hours to replace any component. Theoretically, we can replace the whole system in a matter of minutes because we enable replacement of the whole door and all of the components are on the door. Everything was arranged in a simple way, easy to access, easy to maintain, easy to install in the beginning and that is one aspect of engagement. In this case the engagement is with the customer and with the people who install and or service the system.

Another aspect is with the end-user – what is the right size of the screen? Should it be a touch screen? Should it be portrait or landscape? What information should we present? Too much information is maybe nice but it will take longer for the customer to understand and may block the link while he’s trying to read all the words on the screen. On the other hand, if there is not enough information, they will push the intercom and ask for more information. So trying to think of the user experience, trying to simplify it and put everything in close proximity so people in the winter in Alaska will not have to keep their hand out of the car for more than a few seconds or minimal time, even without any tickets, frictionless or apps that is part of the experience as well.

So engagement and experience, we look at them as core to our product philosophy but also how we behave, work, engage our partners and ecosystem".

What Do You Think Is the Biggest Challenge Regarding Technology Right Now?

"When it comes to our products, and I’ve been in the technology world for all of my career, one of the biggest challenges for a technology company is on the one hand, how to maintain and update all the knowledge, capabilities, features that they’ve built for decades. That’s why (with), introducing the best, latest, smartest, coolest technologies that exist today. What we’ve succeeded, definitely with the launch of X60 but if you look also at every part of our management software application and so on, you have to look for ways to keep the richness of the product developed over decades, while introducing the latest, greatest, coolest technologies today. Our systems, to the best of my knowledge, where the new (hardware) line can work side by side with our old equipment even though it’s totally new. There is not even one screw size that has not be renewed. That was a big part of the effort because we know we have a very large install date, it’s not like we can just come along and say we are new and so on and forget where we came from and the capabilities we have developed over the years. This is a huge advantage over many of our legacy or existing competitors and a huge advantage over newcomers who may pride themselves on new technology but may not have the richness or the wealth of capability that was developed over many years.

We pride ourselves and invest a lot of our time, energy and attention trying to think of our customers and customers’ customers and our partners and employees. How do we build products that are easier for them to operate but also how to engage with them in a better way. Engagement is not only product, metal or pieces of coal but how we do business. It’s all about the Engaged Parking Experience".

Watch the In The Spotlight Video here:

About TIBA Parking Systems 

For 30 years, TIBA has provided innovative solutions for the parking market, resulting in reliable, user-friendly products that lower the price of initial acquisition and the cost of ongoing maintenance. TIBA has done this through a focus on software development, while continuing to enhance and support its reliable hardware platform. This allows owners to keep the capital investment down while still enjoying the latest software functionality. With extensive global experience, TIBA’s robust, scalable architecture enables parking operators to keep pace with the latest trends in centralized operations, automated smart facilities, web reservations and mobile payments. TIBA’s flexible software grants parking operators to be Iot-connected, leveraging big data to increase revenue. TIBA’s agile integrations with third party systems, empowers parking operators to be an integral part of the Smart Cities ecosystem. TIBA serves parking operators and owners globally, across diverse industries such as hotels & hospitality, airports, universities, shopping centers, hospitals & medical centers, and local, state & federal governments.