Northern Virginia Community College Unifies Operations with T2 Solutions

Northern Virginia Community College is the largest educational institution in Virginia. The six unique campuses spread across a densely populated area create a variety of parking challenges. NVCC utilizes T2 Flex Unified Parking Management solutions to streamline enforcement, permit management, and data processing. The institution’s longterm partnership with T2 has proven successful for continued growth and innovation.

Background

With over 75,000 students and nearly 3,000 faculty and staff, NVCC is the second largest community college in the country. The college consists of six different campuses, each with unique parking needs. The Annandale and Medical campuses use Flex PARCS to monitor and control parking in their lots and garages, while other campuses have singlespace or multi-space metered spots where students pay by the hour. During the 16-year partnership, NVCC and T2 have worked together to grow and evolve to the ever-changing demands of the parking industry.

Challenges

Limited space and dense population is a common theme across NVCC campuses. Due to the high volume of traffic and transient nature of the NVCC campus system, many students often resort to parking off campus in the local communities. This creates an abundance of PR and community relations issues for the college and further emphasizes the need for a streamlined parking operation.

Also, many students use multiple campuses, making permit allocation and efficient enforcement practices a constant chore. NVCC continues to add T2 solutions and services to solve business problems and better serve their customers.

Solutions

NVCC moved their parking operation into the T2 private cloud to increase security and relieve internal IT headaches. The cloud-based system also allows all aspects of their parking operation to share data in real time. NVCC also moved all permit and citation processes online which has streamlined productivity and reducded cash handling across the operation.

Cloud-based Confidence

T2’s private cloud utilizes best-in-class technology and the latest hardware and software. It ensures our customer’s data is protected, and their operation is always running efficiently.

“Having a hosted, web-based system is great,” said Cory Thompson, Director of Parking for Northern Virginia Community College. “We don’t have to have our own developers, we receive live system updates automatically, and the great T2 Support team is always helpful.”

The reliability of T2’s cloud also provides Thompson peace of mind. “Flex is always up. I’ve never noticed down time whatsoever,” he said.

Data Done Right

Real-time data has streamlined enforcement across NVCC campuses. “Our data flows seamlessly and in real time to all of our enforcement officers in the field. Now, if an illegally parked student received a parking warning on a different campus 30 minutes ago, our enforcement officers know,” said Thompson.

Flex’s advanced data analysis tools make reporting a snap. “The ability to pull data from Flex quickly and easily has been great,” Thompson said. “We’re a part of the Virginia Community College System (VCCS), the governing body for the 23 community colleges in Virginia. With Flex, we can very easily pull information for the administration on revenue, citations, etc.”

eBusiness and PermitDirect

Reducing cash handling has been a priority for NVCC, and the T2’s eBusiness and PermitDirect solutions allow their students to purchase permits, pay tickets and appeal citations online. “Since implementing these online solutions, we’ve seen a drastic decrease in traffic to our parking office, we can easily track our revenue online, and we’ve had a lot of good feedback from our students and faculty,” Thompson said.

The Unified System

“There are so many components to Flex that make it so easy to manage your revenue, citations, aging of citations, receivables, permits, access control and events. Having all these processes streamlined into one system makes it so much easier to standardize processes and train employees,” Thompson said. “I can’t imagine not having Flex in our system, it’s so integrated into what we do. We live and die by our Flex system.”

About T2 Systems

Started in 1994, T2 Systems is a technology-focused parking system provider with deep roots in the evolving parking industry. This commitment is evident in T2’s quality products and services, thought leadership and strong customer relationships. With its proven, unified solutions, T2 Systems is trusted by close to 400 organizations in the US and Canada including universities, cities, towns, hospitals and parking operators. T2 Systems is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana and has virtual offices throughout the United States and Canada. For additional information about T2 Systems, Inc. products and services, visit www.T2systems.com.