INDUSTRY OBSERVATION

As the eNatis 
dust settles...

A costly conflagaration resulting in a colossal claim. Are consumers getting burnt again?

Let’s face it – sooner or later we will all come face to face with the ‘screaming infant’ that is eNatis. My personal exposure to its teething problems started when I studied an eNatis licence paper looking for the single most important field, the registration number of the vehicle and I couldn’t find it! 

This blatant fault has been rectified but clearly the eNatis system has caused much damage and frustration to the motor industry. My experience, albeit limited, has led me to understand some of the frustrations that have arisen as a result of the implementation of this system. 

The implementation process was fraught with classic technical ‘errors’ like no test site, no pilot test and no capacity stress testing. One has to sympathise with the eNatis data capturers and staff, who bear the brunt of the public’s venom elicited by the new system’s inefficiency. 

What astounds me is just how blatant the technical oversights were and how little training (if any) of eNatis staff had been carried out. After discussions with some of the data processors, it is simply mind boggling that an opportunity to really create something extremely efficient was so flagrantly wasted. Who would believe that something which apparently cost close to R400m would be so poorly handled? 

Instead of streamlining the processes involved in licencing a vehicle, the system developers have actually doubled the number of ‘fields’ required to complete the process. And why do we need a vehicle register number when we have a chassis number? And what relevance does the field called ‘Driven’ (as in selfpropelled) have to licensing? 

Other questions spring to mind, like - are the eNatis fields all option Boxes? Do users have mandatory choices in all their field selections?

Are all manufacturer names standardised? What relevance is the ‘Series’ field when a database of such magnitude should store the actual vehicle model? 

What’s more, do the important fields like chassis and engine numbers conform to the parameters of the factory origin histories? And will the database pick up chassis numbers that have conveniently dropped ‘digits’? 

One of the comments at the Johannesburg licencing office was rather humorous. A chap who does the licensing for a transport operation said, "you know, I come here so often, my boss doesn’t believe that I am actually here!" 

Next month:

At what point do we declare an epidemic of motor industry accidents or at what point is it a crisis for the country?