Businesses everywhere have been faced with all manner of extraordinary challenges as the COVID-19 pandemic wreaks havoc around the world. When restrictions came into force in Australia at the end of March, Suncorp turned to the DIVVY Enterprise parking management system to help them navigate the complex and rapidly changing situation.
Suncorp, one of Australia’s largest financial services brands, has relied on DIVVY Enterprise to manage the onsite parking for their fleet of trade vehicles at their Brisbane and Sydney offices since 2018.
In late March 2020, Suncorp was one of many Australian businesses to transition as many of their employees as possible to working from home. Even so, there remained a core group of essential staff who needed to continue to work from the office.
At a time of heightened social restrictions, Suncorp wanted to help their essential employees avoid commuting via public transport. The onsite parking at their Brisbane and Sydney premises, usually allocated to their tool of trade vehicles, was offered up to their essential workers.
Suncorp were also quick to lease additional off-site commercial parking to ensure they were able to meet the parking needs of their essential staff.
The essential workers did not have access to Suncorp’s onsite parking before COVID-19. The sudden change to Suncorp’s parking usage meant an entirely new cohort of parkers had to be onboarded into the DIVVY system very quickly, so that they could access the car parks.
Over the course of the lockdown period, Suncorp would add more than 100 new users to the DIVVY system.
Because the DIVVY system is so user-friendly, they were able to do so without a hitch. A couple of weeks into the new working arrangements, Suncorp called upon DIVVY’s reporting functionality to reveal the actual usage of their parking bays during this period.
The reports issued by the DIVVY Enterprise system showed that as employees stayed at home as much as possible, actual parking usage was lower than Suncorp’s initial projections. Suncorp were able to relinquish the additional commercial parking bays they had leased at the beginning of the restrictions, thereby returning savings to the business, and transfer the staff who had been using those bays over to the DIVVY system to use Suncorp’s own onsite parking.
Suncorp’s onsite parking never reached full capacity during lockdown because DIVVY optimised the use of the spaces so efficiently. DIVVY managed the high number of parkers and the ad hoc, unpredictable pattern of parking usage without fault.
As restrictions ease and workplaces re-open, Suncorp are gradually transitioning their staff back to their offices, with groups of employees starting to return from mid-June. Subject to government advice regarding safe public transport usage, staff will be encouraged to return to public transport and onsite parking will revert to the tool of trade vehicles. Suncorp will continue to use DIVVY Enterprise to manage and monitor parking usage during the transition period as COVID-19 working procedures are wound down and the trade fleet return to their onsite parking.
Joseph Harmon, Fleet and Car Parking Manager for Suncorp, says,
‘Since 2018, Suncorp has depended on DIVVY to provide convenient and reportable parking management at our Brisbane Square and Shelley Street locations.
DIVVY Enterprise gave us the flexibility to start using our parking bays for a completely different sector of our team almost overnight, helping us to manage our business efficiently during a very unpredictable time.’
DIVVY was fantastic during the COVID-19 restrictions. It gave us complete and accurate visibility over parking bay utilisation and was so easy to use as we added more than a hundred new parkers to the system.
For further information, please contact Kat Fowler, DIVVY’s Marketing and Communications Manager at kat@divvy.com.au.