Case 1 - Airparking Com PDF

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Summary

Airparking Case - includes situational analysis and recommendations...

Description

Name: Woo Seok (Joseph Kim)

Student Number (1004114567)

Situational Analysis Airparking is a Chinese technology company. It provides a service for parking owners to connect with people looking for a parking spot. Airparking’s vision is to transform the traditional parking industry through innovative technologies and a new business model. Company Goals Airparking was founded in 2015, and they were able to grow rapidly with the Customer-toBusiness-to-Customer business (C2B2C) model. To solve its limited resource issue (parking spots), Airparking utilizes the sharing economy which is their key success factor. Airparking was able to solve problems such as cash flow problems, which most start-ups go through. Now, their goal is to receive a ¥10 billion valuation for both Airparking platform and a related asset operation platform. Stakeholder Analysis Customers: High Power, High Interest. The most important stakeholder since our purpose is to provide parking spots through innovative technology. Property Management Companies: Decrease or increase in Airparking’s revenue causes the same effect to property management companies. SWOT Strength: (1) Cloud-based plate recognition system allows Airparking to save important data in both local & cloud. Through the cloud-based system, any external factors (e.g., power outage, internet disconnection) that affect the automated entry/exit, and payment process can be mitigated. (2) Airparking uses a digital solution for their parking management system, which helps property management companies to obtain data such as parking space usage; property management companies can use these data to monitor their operations. (3) Provides a variety of payment methods through embedding mobile payment methods in Airparking’s platform, offering customers a variety of payment methods for their convenience. Weakness: (1) Airparking’s business model requires intensive infrastructure (installing both hardware and software at parking lots). This means it takes a lot of time and effort to build a digitalized parking management. Might take longer for the business to scale.

Opportunities: (1) Airparking could continue their service (serving customers) or sell it as an investment. Threat: (1) Other cities & jurisdictions’ parking lots are regionalized and have their own structure. They would only provide parking spots to exclusive communities and customers. This would be difficult for Airparking to partner up with property management companies; leading to not having enough parking spots for customers to use. (2) Property management companies who operated the parking lots would have to change their revenue stream. This would discourage property management companies to partner up with Airparking due to the complexity of changing their value-chain system. Key Strategic Issue From the SWOT analysis, I believe that Airparking’s strategic issue is the following: “Expanding its business is hard due to other cities’ parking lots are regionalized and they are offered to exclusive communities and customers only”. Identification of strategic options and analysis I believe that this can be solved by taking advantage of their strengths. Airparking has access to “Big Data” from their cloud-based plate recognition system. They can use their strong information system to show other cities’ parking management properties that implementing Airparking’s platform in their property would increase the revenue and number of customers. In addition, they could also show money saved from its automated entry, exit, and payment process. The pro for the above strategic option is that positive results showing from the historical data would be good material to convince other cities’ property management companies to implement Airparking’s platform. However, conducting this data analytics would take a lot of time and resources to analyze and put together the necessary information. Recommendation: To implement the above IT strategic option, Airparking would need data analysts to conduct data analytics. Airparking should take advantage of its strong cloud-based system and use historical data to prove that its platform is worth taking. However, there is a risk since it would take a lot of time and resources to make it work; to mitigate the risk, Airparking should hire a senior in the data analytics team and hire talented data analysts to test, validate, and document processes....