The troubled new electronic national traffic information system (eNaTIS) was back online for vehicle registration from 8am on Tuesday morning, Transport Minister Jeff Radebe said later in the day.
Briefing the media in Pretoria, the minister apologised profusely for delays in the ”functionality” dealing with motor-vehicle registrations, but said that most functions of the new system — implemented by the Tasima consortium — have performed optimally.
”The system has, for instance, performed more than four million transactions, with 50 000 transactions on average per hour, compared to 30 000 transactions in the old system.
”On Thursday May 3, the system was able to reach a new record usage of 500 000 transactions a day, more than was ever recorded on the old system.”
Apart from motor-vehicle registration, eNatis also deals with the introduction of motor vehicles by manufacturers, driving contraventions, accidents and financial information.
The new system is also set to allow easier payment of vehicle-licence renewals. This could decrease the amount of human traffic at service centres by up to 80%, Radebe said, referring to the planned introduction of internet transactions and payment of licence renewals at automated teller machines.
The problem with vehicle registration ”has not gone without being noticed”, he said. The main cause was ”system constraints in server capacity to deal with the demand for database access”.
Thousands of car dealers around the country were up in arms because they could not register new or used cars.
Referring to the system constraints, Radebe said a technical team started implementing interventions after business hours during the past weekend. The team was, however, not able to complete its work until Monday afternoon. A new server with larger capacity was installed.
This weekend, further work will be done to improve communication speed between the database servers and the storage sub-systems.
Backlogs, technical problems and slow systems have been reported at traffic centres, particularly the busier stations, since the start of the upgrading of the old national transport information system to eNaTIS on April 12.
Radebe said that fines issued relating to vehicle licences that expired during the difficult period will be treated on merit and considered for cancellation. — I-Net Bridge