Mail Delivery of Traffic Tickets Keeps Italian Cops on the Beat
Client: Poste Italiane
Challenge: Redevelop the Italian postal service's IT platform to help it move beyond postal services and become the preferred outsourcer for the Italian government.
Solution: Build a flexible, customizable architecture for new clients, based on the same engine, which is able to rapidly respond to the various needs of the mail division.
Results: A 30 percent annual growth and processing of 30 million notifications per year while incurring less management costs and investments when introducing new services.
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In the land of Lamborghini and Ferrari, it's getting a bit easier to get a speeding ticket. A program to reduce the time and money Italian law enforcement spends processing paper traffic tickets is also increasing their ability to fund patrols and collect fines.
Highway patrol and police agencies across Italy are increasingly delegating non-strategic functions, such as traffic ticket processing, to outside providers in a process called integrated service notification. An outside provider can itself be a government agency.
Poste Italiane is a leader in this market, managing the citation process for thousands of police branches across the country. CSC is working to redevelop the Italian postal service's IT platform to help it move beyond postal services and become the preferred outsourcer for the Italian government.
Recovering core business
The system operated by Poste Italiane's Integrated Services Mail Division allows government agencies to recover resources for their own core business and leaves Poste to manage time and resource-consuming administrative tasks.
"The main value is to accelerate the process and not use hundreds of government personnel for things that are not the mission of that agency," explains Vincent Santacroce, IT director of Poste Italiane's mail division. "We wanted to put Poste Italiane in a position to handle these value-added services."
Poste services millions of notifications per year for the highway patrol, scanning them into the system before mailing and monitoring them. The delivery information and the results of the notifications, such as dates, times and addresses, are then provided to the client.
The notification process begins with the infraction and a ticket from the highway patrol, county or municipal police. The mail division sends notice to an offender. Then, Poste's banking division and other fiscal agencies collect and process the fine. The process is customized for each law enforcement agency based on the level of service requested.
Moving beyond the mailbox
Poste Italiane connects to 5,200 police branches, and has 60 contracts with municipal police, local transport companies and government agencies. It also manages fiscal penalties for 180 government clients, from municipalities to national ministries. Poste's Release Shared Service Center in Rome processes more than 20,000 documents per day.
In 2000, Poste Italiane processed 1.5 million fines, but that amount increased to 20 million a year later. As the number of notifications in need of processing skyrocketed, the Poste Italiane systems, which had been used for just three years, couldn't keep up.
"In the beginning the market was driving us," Santacroce says. "But when the volume started increasing, then came the technology problem, such as networking and connectivity challenges. The technical challenge was introducing a high value technology in order to manage a more efficient process."
Poste had amassed more than 20 different applications built individually for each client. But the systems weren't efficient or scalable, and led to higher costs for maintenance and new services.
Reengineering for the future
In 2003, Poste chose CSC to "reengineer" and maintain the platform. CSC redesigned the whole process by building a flexible, customizable architecture for new clients, based on the same engine and able to rapidly respond to the various needs of the mail division.
"CSC Italia has been able to supply the right deliverable to the right person in the right moment," says CSC Italia account manager Enrico Corsetti. "CSC's success has been recognized by the client, and by the market, through the growth of its business volume."
The new program runs on a single platform that can be tailored to each customer's specific needs. Where the original applications were rigid and costly, the platform's latest iteration captures existing processes to reduce management costs and investments when introducing new services.
Poste Italiane now experiences 30 percent annual growth and processes 30 million notifications per year.
"We had to give our technical partner the ability to take charge of the process," Santacroce says. "My expectations were completely met. CSC understood what we needed and put the personnel with the right skills in place to increase productivity. There was also a kind of flexibility and speed, which was right what we needed to be on time."