Park ’N Fly accelerates innovation by up to 43% with AI-assistance from Dynatrace, through Trace3 partnership

Expansion and cloud migration drives complexity

Park ‘N Fly is an off-airport parking operator that commits to picking customers up at their cars in five minutes or less before dropping them off at their terminal. Park ‘N Fly prides itself on offering more than just parking. It is a technology-driven company, focused on providing great customer experiences and streamlining the entire process of operating airport parking. Park ‘N Fly has also grown rapidly, expanding to 15 locations across the U.S. and serving almost 1.4 million customers in 2019.

To further enhance the customer experience, Park ‘N Fly needed to improve its ability to release new digital functionality faster and with greater frequency. To support this, Park ‘N Fly migrated its IT environment to the cloud, and is running a container-based architecture on Kubernetes and Microsoft Azure. However, while this helped Park ‘N Fly to become more agile and release code more frequently, it also led to increased complexity, with applications running on dynamic infrastructure, making it more difficult to maintain full-stack observability across the environment. Traditional monitoring tools were unable to keep up with the constant change in Park ‘N Fly’s dynamic environment, leaving developers unable to gain real-time insights into the customer experience.

AI-assistance eliminates detective work

To proactively optimize the customer experience and gain full-stack observability, Park ‘N Fly needed a new approach to monitoring. To find a solution, Park ‘N Fly engaged with its strategic partner, Trace3, an authority in digital transformation specializing in intelligent operations that help customers modernize and mature their operational capabilities. Trace3 recommended the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform would best meet Park ‘N Fly’s demand for observability into its environment. Dynatrace’s continuous automation and AI capabilities would help developers gain code-level insights into applications to better understand how to dynamically optimize the customer experience.

“It’s vital that we’re able to create a frictionless customer experience – in a competitive market like airport parking, we need to make sure it’s as easy as possible for the customer to make a reservation. Dynatrace gives us a sixth sense of what’s going on in our environment, so we can proactively optimize experiences and improve outcomes for our business. Working with Trace3 has also been invaluable – its team is very engaged in our business and is working hard to ensure we’re doing all the right things to maximize our success. Trace3 has been especially important in helping us to make sure every dollar spent in the cloud is validated and our entire transformation is a success,” said Ken Schirrmacher, Sr. Director of Information Technology, Park ‘N Fly.

Life with Dynatrace

• Rapid time to value: Dynatrace’s OneAgent made it very easy to deploy its platform and to continuously instrument Park ‘N Fly’s dynamic cloud-native, containerized environment as well as detect any changes. This meant Park ‘N Fly was able to start seeing results instantly, unlocking AI-driven insights into customer experience.
• Full-stack observability: With Dynatrace, Park ‘N Fly gains code-level insights into its cloud environment to help its digital team optimize the customer experience. The team no longer needs customers to tell Park ‘N Fly where improvements are needed – by pinpointing any struggle points proactively, the team can ensure every user experience matters, and act on any lessons learned to deliver further improvements for future users.
• Greater cross-team collaboration: Everyone in IT at Park ‘N Fly has access to Dynatrace, with teams using it to continuously optimize the customer experience and to analyze the success of new code being deployed into production. The business team also has access and uses Dynatrace to understand the impact of performance on business outcomes and to see how IT is adding value.
• Increased speed of innovation: Dynatrace enables a fail-fast approach at Park ‘N Fly and has been instrumental in the launch of two key new customer-facing features for its mobile app – ‘Come Get Me’ and ‘Shuttle Tracker’. It gives the team confidence to try new things to improve customer experiences and fall back quickly if there is a problem, instead of spending days or weeks looking to understand the business impact of their change. The AI-assistance from Dynatrace has helped Park ‘N Fly accelerate its development cadence by 29 percent on average and deliver 43 percent more story points during its busiest two-week sprint.

“Working without Dynatrace is like going cave diving without a light – we’re just not able to see what’s around us and don’t have a map of our environment. With Dynatrace, we’re able to cut through the darkness to make sense of our complex environment, gaining rich insights into how we can optimize the customer experience,” Schirrmacher continued. “It also gives me more time to help mold and train my team. As a manager, I simply don’t have time to go digging through data to debug code, but because Dynatrace offers precise answers, I don’t need to don my detective hat. Instead, I can work more collaboratively with my team to optimize the customer experience and look at training that can help them to meet their own personal objectives.”