Making urban mobility effortless with smarter parking solutions
How Estapar transformed the parking experience with the Databricks Platform
Faster license plate analysis — from 3 days to real time
Data sources unified for more holistic decision-making
Productivity boost — delivering the work of 100+ people with just 5
Estapar, Brazil’s largest parking network, sought to optimize the parking customer experience by gaining real-time insights into parking usage and demand. The company needed to consolidate transactions across their facilities and forecast future demand. With the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Estapar was able to unify data across multiple sources, enabling smarter decision-making, efficient performance monitoring and personalized services. As a result, Estapar reduced data processing time from three days to real-time, improved demand forecasting accuracy, and empowered business teams with self-service analytics, driving a significant boost in operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Overcoming data barriers to smarter urban mobility
Estapar, Brazil’s largest parking network, operates in 96 cities, managing over 490,000 parking spaces across approximately 731 locations. In addition to their vast network, Estapar oversees the rotational parking system in 19 cities, including São Paulo, cementing their leadership in urban mobility and parking solutions nationwide. Serving more than 7 million users via their Zul+ app, Estapar offers a variety of services, such as parking reservations, real-time offers and personalized recommendations. However, as the company grew, they faced significant challenges in managing and extracting value from their expanding data landscape.
As Head of Data at Estapar, William Silva’s mission is clear: “We are focused on transforming data into a strategic asset that fuels innovation and growth.“ Estapar’s business goals include enhancing operational efficiency, personalizing customer interactions and embracing AI-driven solutions to maintain a competitive edge in the urban mobility space. Estapar has several key business use cases in production aimed at improving both operational efficiency and customer service. These include consolidating transactions across their parking facilities for accurate reporting, monitoring performance and forecasting demand to optimize parking availability and integrating key databases for data-driven decision-making. The company also uses their unified database for customer segmentation, enabling personalized communication, and is developing an AI-driven agent to improve customer support through the Zul+ app.
As a large company, Estapar faced some challenges in improving this front. Some areas had a fragmented data landscape, with distinct databases, creating silos that could cause difficulties in generating actionable insights. “We were handling complex data pipelines across different fronts, which made generating insights time-consuming and resource-intensive,” William said. In addition, Estapar’s business teams heavily relied on the data team to access and analyze the information, which did not bring the necessary agility to decision-making. To future-proof their operations and integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, Estapar chose to integrate some information and experiences into a platform that could unify their data and scale to meet future demands.
How Databricks helped Estapar take control of their data
One of the products chosen was the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, which enabled the company to centralize and democratize their data operations. By implementing the Databricks Platform, Estapar consolidated all transactional and customer data into a unified platform, enabling a comprehensive view of their operations. This unification was key to enhancing both internal decision-making and customer experiences.
The introduction of AI/BI Genie data rooms allowed business users to independently access and analyze data without requiring technical expertise. Teams could now generate insights in real time, empowering them to forecast demand, optimize operations and improve overall efficiency. “Databricks enables us to democratize data,” William said. “Our business users can now make smarter decisions faster without relying on our data team.”
Estapar also implemented Delta Live Tables (DLT) to automate data pipelines and improve operational efficiency. The integration of Unity Catalog enhanced data governance, ensuring secure and compliant access to sensitive data. Real-time analytics capabilities allowed Estapar to forecast demand and optimize operations, enabling them to respond quickly to market changes. To streamline their machine learning lifecycle, they leveraged MLflow to simplify and accelerate the development and deployment of AI models.
These solutions not only addressed Estapar’s immediate challenges but also laid the groundwork for future AI-driven innovations. The flexibility and scalability of Databricks, combined with internal expertise and acquired experience, provided the foundation Estapar needed to explore advanced technologies, including GenAI.
Real-world impact and a future fueled by innovation
The adoption of Databricks has had a transformative impact on Estapar’s operations. Data processing was streamlined and can now be completed in real time, enabling the company to make agile and informed decisions. By eliminating data silos, Estapar gained a holistic view of their operations, improving efficiency and customer service.
Empowering business teams with self-service analytics is also a point of success. Teams can now independently analyze sales trends, forecast demand and identify operational improvements, reducing their reliance on the data team. This shift has improved productivity across the organization while allowing the lean data team to focus on strategic initiatives.
Estapar’s exploration of AI and ML capabilities has also advanced significantly. The company is now leveraging Databricks to develop AI-powered agents aimed at enhancing customer support and streamlining operations. These innovations are set to further improve the user experience for Zul+ app users and reduce response times for customer inquiries.
“Databricks helped us with better curation for data utilization,” William said. “We can unify our operations, empower our teams and innovate more and more.”
Looking ahead, Estapar plans to continue building on their data strategy, leveraging Databricks to drive additional efficiencies and develop new capabilities that will shape the future of urban mobility. The company’s investment in data-driven solutions has positioned them as a leader in the mobility space, delivering measurable results for their customers and stakeholders.