Legacy parking control system, rebuilt
BEFORE · ENTERVOAFTER · INTERVALOSThe same job in two systems: entervo's System Monitor on the left, the IntervalOS statistics screen on the right. Drag the handle to compare.
01 THE PROBLEM
The facility ran on entervo, built in the early 2000s for stability rather than speed. I worked shifts on it. These are the screens I worked in and the papers the manager kept.
To let one car through, the operator had to find it, act on the device and check the machine. entervo kept each of those in a different application, so one intercom call meant three or four windows.
Pick a step
entervo recorded every payment but gave the manager no way to count the day or keep the books in order. So each day closed on a sheet like this one, worked out by hand. Faults arrived by phone and were written down later, from memory.
Every manual opening had a reason, and none of them reached the system. The manager rebuilt them as totals in a spreadsheet, with no name, time or lane behind any line.
Drawn to scale from that report. Nearly eight in ten manual openings were a disability permit, the single check the old system gave no screen to.
Working the floor gave me hypotheses, not findings. I tested them against the operators I work beside and the manager who closes every shift. One number came out of an interview I could never have reached from my own seat.
7x/hour
barrier incidents per operator
₪600,000
lost during one stretch of system failure
By the second honk the operator stops searching and opens the barrier. No name, no reason, no timestamp.
Downtime showed up as a fault, never as a loss. The ₪600,000 figure came from the manager, not from entervo.
Two roles, one root cause. The system recorded nothing.
Capture the reason at the moment of the action and both problems collapse into one.
The barrier first, the back office after. Every screen earned its place by how often it is opened.
| N° | FREQUENCY | MOMENT | OWNER |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | 7x / hour | Driver stuck at the barrier | Operator |
| 02 | 1x / shift | Cash reconciliation | Manager |
| 03 | 1x / month | Reports and settings | Manager |
Paper, phone calls, guesswork from memory: each now lives at the operator's console or the manager's desk. What the operator does during a call becomes a line the manager can read, count and reconcile.
Each old workaround next to the element on screen that replaces it.
Capture the reason, then see the state, without leaving the call.
Verifying a disability tag meant leaving the call for another window while the queue built up behind the barrier. The check now happens inside the call: two conditions confirmed and the gate open in the same breath, and the audit trail is a by product of the decision, not extra work.
The permit check sits above the action grid, not in another window. Confirming it is what opens the barrier, so the record and the decision are one gesture.
The old system could only describe the floor once somebody else had already noticed it. IntervalOS holds every location in a single ranked view, so the operator’s picture of the site is current by default. A stuck exit that used to mean a drive to the gate now restarts from the desk, and every lane reports itself, ticket stock included.
Exit 206: stuck, restarted, back to normal in one tap.
Attribute the action, then use the record.
Entries, exits, income and plate recognition (LPR) failures now share one screen, each figure carrying the previous week beside it, so drops show up early and broken equipment gets a price. The shift ends with a number instead of an estimate assembled afterwards, and the same view leaves as a PDF or an email, so nothing is retyped.
Forty seven LPR failures is a number the old system could produce. Forty seven failures sitting next to the week’s income is the one that gets acted on.
Manual openings used to leave the building with no author, which made both discipline and defence impossible. Attaching each action to the operator on duty is not really about the record. It is about what people do knowing the record exists. Plate, lane and reason attach to whoever was on the shift, and an understaffed night shows up on the roster, not on the shift.
The filter row is the point. Manual approvals are one click away from the full log, because that is the only category anybody ever goes looking for.
Operators heard about payment app outages from angry drivers, never from the system.
The answer is a signal that stays quiet until it matters.
Set aside: A permanent status panel for every payment app.
Chosen: A status light that changes only on a critical failure.
What the operator sees when Pango, one of the parking payment apps, goes down:
entervo photographed as it runs today, next to the same task in IntervalOS.
IntervalOS screens show prototype data.
Working the floor
My own shifts on entervo
The operators
The people I work beside
The manager
One interview
Someone using it (not done yet)
Not done yet. The next step.
Do operators read the permit check, or tap through it?
Two deliberate confirmations sit on the most common legitimate action in the building. If they turn into one reflex, the friction buys nothing. No screen can settle that. A real shift can.
