Sainsbury, one of Britain’s leading food retailers with over 1,000 stores nationwide, offers its customers free parking. However, not all visitors to Sainsbury’s car parks actually use the store resulting in lost sales and revenue. Sainsbury stores are often located in town centres where car parking is limited. This means it is vital for the supermarket to ensure that customers have somewhere to park when they visit Sainsbury’s to shop. However, the nationwide store chain began noticing that not all of the people using their car parks were in fact shopping at their stores, thereby reducing the number of spaces available for their customers.

This situation was associated directly with the loss of revenue experienced by Sainsbury, leading to the supermarket deciding to manage and control their car parks more effectively. The national car park management company, Euro Car Parks (ECP), was appointed to install the latest ANPR technology to combat this growing trend of ‘rogue’ parking. People leaving their vehicles in the supermarket’s car parks for over the permitted time will now automatically receive a Parking Charge Notice through the post.

To achieve effective monitoring, ECP enlisted the help of general building firm Merr Construction to install a Pips ANPR camera solution that would read and store the number plates of any vehicles entering and exiting the Sainsbury car parks managed by ECP.

To avoid any potential disruption to shoppers and to keep costs as low as possible, ECP decided to use wireless technology as a transmission medium for sending the number plate images from the ANPR cameras back to the stores, where they were then stored on their network. This solution meant that costly civil engineering works to install a fibre network to the camera location were not needed, power for the wireless radios and cameras is provided via an existing car park lighting column.

Wavesight’s Wavesprint point-to-point links, optimised for short distance and low bandwidth transmission, were chosen to transmit the number plate images. Wavesprint eliminates the planning delays and disruption associated with laying fibre or leasing lines. This means lower deployment costs and a faster return on investment, in addition to a rapidly re-deployable asset.

James Carey, project manager at Euro Car Parks commented on the installation: “We were confident that Wavesight could come up with a low-cost car park solution that would allow us to deploy our ANPR cameras at a number of Sainsbury car parks across the UK. The link required was fast to install and minimised any disruption to Sainsbury’s customers”