Some NZ Transport Agency services unavailable this weekend

The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) is advising customers that due to a major computer system upgrade several of its vehicle transactions and services will not be available this weekend.

From 7am on Saturday 25 August until 9pm Sunday 26 August people will be unable to: 

• buy an annual vehicle (vehicle rego) or Road User Charges licence
• apply to change ownership or exempt a vehicle from registration
• register and obtain plates for a new or imported vehicle
• access online vehicle registration checking services, eg Motochek .

Vehicle traders and others will be unable to verify vehicle registration information for the purposes of buying and selling vehicles while the upgrade is completed over the weekend.

The weekend upgrade will be the last stage of a two year project to modernise the NZTA’s 17-year-old mainframe system to a modern computer platform. The last stage of the upgrade involves migrating (or transferring) more than one billion individual records to the new system.

Celia Patrick, NZTA Group Manager for Access and Use, said the agency apologised for any inconvenience while the upgrade is completed this weekend.

“We looked at several options for performing the switch-over, but given that the only way to achieve it is to take the system completely offline for several hours, the weekend upgrade will be the least disruptive for customers,” says Ms Patrick.

“The new system will better accommodate advances in technology and, over time, will support a wider range of services to be adopted with changes able to be made more quickly, easily and cheaply.”

Already completed parts of the upgrade project include:

• providing a new computer environment for front line staff
• building a new back-office computer platform
• successfully migrating data on the driver licence register to the new platform in May.

More information is available at www.nzta.govt.nz/online(external link)