Trusted data helps transport and traffic agency increase public safety, reduce vehicle fraud and theft

The transport and traffic agency serving Asia Pacific has a unique role: collecting and analyzing massive amounts of transportation data for multiple government agencies, helping them ensure driver safety, and prevent fraud and theft by exchanging detailed information about everything from traffic patterns to vehicle registrations. 

Reliable data is their golden ticket to delivering high-quality information, advice, and services across borders. But with this unique role came some unique challenges. 

After decades of operation, their national vehicle database, a core system allowing multiple provinces to exchange information, needed modernization – it couldn’t reasonably keep pace with modern-day data management needs. Its limitations created data silos with no historical view, forcing the agency (and the other agencies using its data) to waste additional time and effort looking for the data they needed — if they could find it at all. They needed a way to efficiently deliver high-quality data at scale. 

One Platform, Endless Possibilities 

“Our objective was to make sure each jurisdiction had accurate, up-to-date records across state and provincial boundaries,” said the Applications Development Manager/Information Architect. “For example, we want to make it easy to determine whether a person applying for a license in one state already has one in another, or whether a car registered in one jurisdiction is already registered in another, which could indicate possible fraud or theft. We’re supporting the agency’s overall charter of ‘one person, one driver’s license, one vehicle registration.’”  

Working with a BI and data warehouse consultancy, the agency implemented the Talend ESB platform to bring the vehicle database into the 21st century, while also migrating from an on-premises datacenter to cloud-based AWS. 

Almost immediately, the development team discovered that Talend was user-friendly; it could work with older code written in multiple scripting languages, it could rapidly integrate multiple data sources, and it scaled easily to match production spikes. Talend also blew away their batch ingestion SLA of 10 minutes, completing each batch in less than one second.   

Today, with Talend in place, the agency and the other agencies that rely on its data no longer have to worry about unavailable or hard to find data. They can now pull data from multiple sources to build out a comprehensive, central data view, complete with audit capabilities and a fault-tolerant error handling mechanism. 

Equally important, Talend proved very agile - allowing the agency to rapidly adapt to new challenges and changing business requirements. “We saw that the capabilities Talend brought to the table would be useful in additional projects beyond the vehicle database modernization,” said the Applications Development Manager/Information Architect. One example: Talend is a centerpiece in a new initiative that is replacing single-point-in-time records with real-time, chronological, historical records of all interactions regarding a specific vehicle registration or driver’s license. 

“We can see who has owned the vehicle over its lifetime, see what other vehicles an individual has owned, look at addresses and see corresponding vehicle ownership records, and so on,” said the Applications Development Manager/Information Architect. “The ability to see data over an extended period of time gives us a much more powerful tool to identify potential theft, fraud, and safety issues.” 

Over time, the historical database capabilities could also be extended to revenue-generating data services involving third-party organizations such as insurance companies, auto brokers, vehicle disposal companies, and more. 

Talend has helped the agency streamline and accelerate operations so it can focus on its core mission: solving problems for transport agencies and making mobility safer for the citizens of the Asia Pacific.