Valeo Industrial Park

Mission
Valeo started the production of auto lights systems in Romania in September 2005. In just ten years, the production capacity rose to 39,000 square meters, with over 1400 employees on site in Timis County who produce headlights, fog lamps, stop lights and tuck headlights for the biggest names in auto industry.

The industrial park in Timis county includes a warehouse, a production area and office spaces.

The production unit is divided in three categories - service market (AFM); special products (SP) and original equipment (OEM).

Valeo Lighting Injection SA is part of Valeo, independent industrial group that focuses on the design, production and sale of components, integrated systems and modules for the automotive industry. Valeo is among the top automotive suppliers in the world: in 2014, the group had sales of over 12.7 billion Euro worldwide.

Solution
Hundreds of cars enter every day in the industrial park. Employees with cars, delivery cars, distribution truck, buses, taxis and others pass through the gate. The company needed a way to keep track of all this movement and keep records of how often certain cars are on location, how long trucks and cars are staying, or how long a loading for tucks lasts. A special request of Valeo was that all this information to be available in real time and automated. This means that the client didn't want just to read some reports at the end of the day about what happened on site. Or just to sit in front of the computer screen to watch every car in the parking.
In this case, a special feature of Metrici software fitted like a glove for them: the possibility to set an alarm for special events. In this specific location, Valeo administrator set more types of alert according to the time spent by a car inside the parking: 15 minutes, 3 hours, 12 hours and blacklist - were the types of lists and alarms created.
For each type of alarm, a certain number of cars were allocated (were introduced in an alert group). If a car listed in the 15 minutes group, for example, would stay more than a quarter of an hour, a mail alert is sent to the administrator.
Also, any car entering the industrial park is automatically included in the 12 hour group alarm. This means an email is sent every time a car stays in the parking more than 12 hours. Also the blacklist was quite important. At the detection of a number plate on that list, Metrici will automatically sent an email to the administrator.

Valeo technical data

  • 2 Axis LPR cameras
  • 2 Metrici low-pass filters
  • 2 Metrici licenses (1 BL and 1 EL license)
  • 1 Metrici Towersys
  • 1 traffic light and gates

Results
To be honest, the integrator, unfamiliar with automatic number plate recognition products, tried initially another LPR solution at Valeo industrial park. He downloaded a demo software of a competitor and put it at work for tests. He was negatively surprised of how bad it was: "it only succeeded a recognition every now and then", as he later told. The dilemma was how he could tell the final client that he paid for a solution which doesn't delivery anything he expected. He began to ask on the market which is the best LPR solution, which in fact he should have done in the first place to get rid of all the problems. Everyone recommended Metrici. He tried our demo version of the software and only after a couple of days, he realized that indeed this is the best LPR solution on the market and installed it on location without hesitation. As a bonus for both integrator and client, Metrici had already included all the features Valeo needed. Not only simple detection, but alarms, counting, reports, integration with traffic light for blacklist etc. A happy integrator, a happy client and a happy ending for a new project under the Metrici brand.