Some NZ Transport Agency services down 25 – 26 August

The NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) advises 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 not be able 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.

Celia Patrick, NZTA group manager apologises for any inconvenience the outage may cause and encourages people to carry out vehicle-related transactions before the weekend if possible.

"The project team considered other ways and times to perform the switch-over but given the only way to achieve it is to take the system offline for a period of time, this plan was settled on as being the least disruptive," 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."

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

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/outage/.