The government’s new electronic national traffic information system, eNaTIS, had processed more than two million transactions by Tuesday, but received heavy criticism from the motor industry for slow service and backlogs.
Department of Transport spokesman Ntau Letebele on Tuesday said the system was processing an average of 13 transactions per second and 45 000 to 60 000 per hour.
”Since April 12 to date we’ve done 2,3-million transactions in total — this means people are getting services on the system.”
Interventions had been implemented to improve performance over the past week in order to cope with high demands and the slowness of the new system, he said.
Backlogs, technical glitches and shaky, slow systems have been reported since the old system was taken offline earlier this month to be upgraded to the new eNaTIS system.
The new service is electronic and anticipated benefits include allowing traffic-related transactions through automated teller machines (ATMs) and the internet.
During the upgrade in which one billion records were transferred, vehicle-testing stations, vehicle-registering authorities and driver’s licence-testing centres countrywide were shut down for four business days.
On Tuesday motor-industry officials told the South African Press Association that the impact on the industry was huge.
”The whole switch over has been an absolute disaster for the motor industry at this stage,” said Retail Motor Industry (RMI) organisation CEO Jeff Osborne.
”Our current experience with it up and running is worse — it’s too slow and it’s not handling the volume. We’re sitting with three weeks of backlog that’s got to be put through the system.”
New-car sales manager at Weiss Volkswagen in Durban, Aman Lutchman, said the delays in getting the required eNaTIS documents had affected new-car licensing, car deliveries and payments from banks.
”It’s basically put a go-slow on the whole business.”
Auto Bavaria Midrand general manager Piet van der Merwe said the registering of new cars, de-registering of trade-ins for re-sale and interest paid by dealers on cars while they remained on the floor had been affected.
”This is so huge the whole industry could collapse — it’s a big impact countrywide.”
Karin Wise of Daytona Luxury Cars in Rivonia, Johannesburg, said documents were arriving in ”dribs and drabs”.
About five licence and registration documents of 30 had been returned after about two weeks, she said.
Letebele said interventions taken had included increasing processor power on application servers by 50% and on database servers by 30%.
The system had also been enabled to operate at a higher demand due to the backlog.
In response to the motor-industry complaints, he outlined a three-day comparison between eNaTIS on April 19, 20 and 23 and the 14-year-old NaTIS on April 19 to 21 last year.
Vehicle introductions by manufacturers had increased by nearly 6 000 while vehicle-licensing transactions had risen from 118 439 to 125 206, he said.
New-vehicle registrations had decreased from 40 849 to 33 801.
Nico Vermeulen, executive director of the National Association of Automobile Manufacturers of South Africa, told Business Report on Monday that there was a possibility the release of April sales figures would be delayed.
”There is little purpose in reporting sales that significantly understate the market, are patently inaccurate and misleading,” he said.
Apart from the motor industry, the backlog and slow system has also affected the general public.
On Monday the gates to the Langlaagte station in Johannesburg closed and re-opened a number of times in order to regulate the flow of people.
Letebele said the department apologised for the inconvenience, saying it was unintended.
”We generally regret the inconvenience caused but we’re quite satisfied that within a very short space of time we should be able to clear the backlog. The system will revert back to normal and we should be able to offer service without any delays.
”Where we find problems, we try to deal with them.” — Sapa