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Driving transformation at the DVLA
Driving transformation at the DVLA Written by Fran Roberts Produced by Richard Durrant
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is an executive agency, sponsored by the UK’s Department for Transport. Located in Swansea for over 50 years, the agency is now in the middle of an exciting IT transformation programme
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ver the years the DVLA has embraced modern technology, moving many of its services online. For example, driving licences can be applied for or details amended online, rather than using a paper form. Such digital transformation continues to this day through the DVLA Strategic Plan 2017 to 2020, which lists both moving to more agile and cloud based services, alongside online processes for notifying a medical condition, in its priorities. “DVLA spends over £300mn a year on goods and services. It spends a lot more on goods and services than it does on staff, which is unusual in the public sector,”
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advises Andrew Falvey, Commercial Director. “My team manages around 300 contracts – about 250 of which are IT contracts, along with 2,500 data sharing contracts and 250 agreements with other government bodies. The biggest category we have in terms of spend is IT. “We’ve got 15 fully MCIPS qualified staff and another 20 staff being trained to this level at the moment. Overall we have about 68 staff in commercial roles in my Directorate.” MISSION CRITICAL With 45mn driver records stored in its systems, IT is fundamental to the DVLA. “They are mission critical,” Falvey comments. “If our systems
Andrew Falvey Commercial Director
Andrew Falvey joined DVLA in 2010 as Head of Commercial Services, moving to become Assistant Director (Commercial) in 2012. He became Commercial Director in May 2015.
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www.ricoh.co.uk
Ricoh partners with the DVLA to deliver digital transformation. The Ricoh Commercial & Industrial Printing Team has been a long term partner of the DVLA Output Services Group. Thirty years ago we were the provider of high-speed mainframe printers, today we are a systems integrator and technology enabler providing workflow solutions that have underpinned and evolved with the DVLA operation for almost 20 years. Ricoh (formerly InfoPrint Solutions) was at the forefront of the drive in the UK to turn the Gartner Automated Document Factory concept into a practical reality. DVLA was among our first customers to embrace both the concept and the Ricoh approach. Our earliest workflow implementation successfully focussed on the secure production of DVLA’s array of paper-based products. The tracking of data, logical pages, physical pages, documents and envelopes all ensured that driving licences and tax discs were accurately delivered to the intended recipient. When the DVLA introduced its new photo card driving licence, a highly competitive tender process showed that it made clear sense to build on the system already in place – evolution, not revolution. The security, reliability and availability of the system was already proven. What needed to be proved next were scalability and flexibility. The system
was extended to provide DVLA with two unique capabilities: a secure stock control system and a new class of output device – a laser engraver. Every UK Driving Licence has a unique identifier built into it during the base card manufacturing process and the enhanced system tracks every card through the manufacturing process: booking cards into and out of a secure vault; matching a driver to a unique card number; engraving data and image onto each card; matching the finished licence with the correct paper carrier prior to enveloping; providing an audit trail for every card for every step of the process and finally feeding other DFT systems with any necessary production data. Having set the benchmark for secure licence production, the Output Solutions Group was confidently able to use the same technology to offer additional services both within the DVLA and externally to other Government departments. Consequent evolutions have seen the introduction of other digital technologies on the same workflow platform. Smart Tachograph cards and Biometric Residency Permits both now emerge from the same production system and both contain a chip for encoded personalised information. Secure card production is now a key offering for DVLA.
In meeting stringent Home Office requirements for tracking and audit for the Biometric Residency Permit, the DVLA production facility has shown itself equipped to meet the demands of even the most exacting customers. The recent migration to Ricoh’s latest generation of workflow software has positioned the DVLA ready for another decade and for the adoption of other new digital technologies. Building on tried and trusted technology, Ricoh Process Director is the result of over 20 years of research and development into workflow and process automation. There is no doubt that other physical products produced by OSG will evolve to include more digital content and Ricoh Process Director will continue to be the core enabler that facilitates the expansion of digital, but in a secure and managed way. Ricoh is delighted that the strong and close partnership with the DVLA is now set to move into a fourth decade. We look forward to continuing to work together to design, develop and deploy solutions that handle the complexities of mission critical communication in a fast changing world. Ricoh and DVLA share a passion for excellence and innovation and that shared passion has been the cornerstone of our partnership and our joint success.
Target provides DVLA award winning Direct Debit solution for vehicle tax payments in just eighteen weeks Target designed and implemented a solution for The DVLA that enables consumers to pay their vehicle tax by Direct Debit. Three years on, the service has been used by more than 17 million drivers to set up 40 million Direct Debit mandates and has collected over £5bn in revenue, including £156m in a single day. Reliable as well as popular, it has been an important element of DVLA’s ongoing “Simpler, Better, Safer” strategy and helped DVLA increase its digital take-up. In 2016, Target secured a new contract to continue to manage the system for a further two years. Simple, quick and efficient: since the DVLA launched its online vehicle tax renewal service in 2006, it has become recognised as an exemplar amongst the public sector web services; and helped position DVLA as pioneers of government digital transformation. 17 million users Just 18 weeks after Target was brought in, the solution went live and was met by huge demand. The reliability of the solution, added to its simplicity from the user perspective, has meant that Direct Debit has become a preferred payment method for over 17 million customers.
The solution A secure online system, interfacing with BACS; and the provision of a contact centre solution serviced by DVLA agents. The results • 17 million customers have paid by Direct Debit • £5bn worth of Direct Debits collected – including £156m on a single day in 2017 • 24x7x365 service availability • High levels of customer satisfaction
Rohan Gye, Vehicles Service Manager, DVLA commented: “From the user perspective, Direct Debit has been a major success for us, we want to make paying vehicle tax as simple and convenient as possible in a way that suits them. With the support of Target we are pleased to offer millions of motorists the choice of paying vehicle tax by Direct Debit in annual, six monthly or monthly instalments”
The DVLA’s collection service is now one of the largest in the country in terms of both the number of customers and the revenue generated. Savings and satisfaction As well as the benefits to customers, the service has also helped the DVLA meet other financial and strategic targets such as increasing digital take-up. Target has continued to work closely with the DVLA to optimise and continuously improve the service. That combination of innovation and service helped the solution win Best Online Payments Solution (Consumer) at the 2016 Payments Awards.
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ABOUT US Target are a leading business services provider in lending, investments and insurance creating value for clients through digital, customer journey, outsourcing and operational transformation. Our aim is to transform the way you service your clients. Target is proudly part of the $4.5bn global organisation Tech Mahindra, a global leader in IT solutions, BPO, business consulting services & digital technologies with operations in over 90 countries and 112,000 employees worldwide.
at DVLA go down then about 4,000 long-term supply contracts with IT people stop work, so availability suppliers. We’ve also got a very big is huge, resilience is massive. cloud transformation programme Supporting that is very important. going on as well,” explains Falvey. The challenge we’ve got is the age of our IT systems, they are dated legacy MAJOR MILESTONES systems. We’re six months into a The move away from big IT contracts transformation programme to move has been a major change for the away from these legacy systems, DVLA in recent years. “One of the and to totally re-engineer major milestones for DVLA and re-architect our has been insourcing our IT IT. Supporting function, which was back DVLA SPENDS that is a massive in 2015. We insourced priority for our IT over 300 people, commercial team.” which followed the As the largest end of a long-standing A YEAR ON GOODS category within the IT contract. That created AND SERVICES commercial directorate, a great deal of work for around 25 employees the commercial team, in are entirely dedicated to IT. The terms of novating and insourcing all DVLA has moved away from big IT the contracts that were part of the contracts. It has some enterprise outsourced contract,” Falvey advises. agreements with companies like IBM “We ran a commercial project and Oracle, but the vast majority for 18 months to do that, and of its IT contracts now are two successfully managed to insource years in length, which is following or novate around 180 contracts. GDS (Government Digital Service) I think the perception was that guidelines. “We’re moving, as when we insourced we’d have much as we can, into open source fewer IT contracts, but of course to get away from being locked into when you insource you’re
OVER £300MN
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suddenly in charge of all aspects of IT. Therefore, everything – from licences, support and maintenance, hardware, software, resourcing, contracting – comes in-house. So, that’s been a big change for us in the last couple of years.” For this project, the team won the award for the Best Public Procurement Project in 2016 at the CIPS (Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply) Supply Management Awards, and the GO Award for Best Contract Management Initiative in 2015/16. BEST IN CLASS This is not the only area in which the DVLA has won an award recently. The agency won the Skills Award at the 2017 Civil Service Awards for its CLASS programme. “I’m very committed to learning and development, and we’ve been running for the last couple of years a programme for upskilling and developing our staff. We call it CLASS, which is an acronym for ‘commercial leadership and skills support’. The CLASS programme’s
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been very successful,” states Falvey. “We’ve got staff doing professional exams with CIPS, and we’ve developed our CLASS programme, which aims to complement formal CIPS training and includes practical learning modules and workbased projects. We’ve also got a mentoring programme, which is more informal, and staff take-up of this has been excellent.” As with the IT contracts, CLASS is run entirely in-house by the DVLA. “We have done that all ourselves, that’s why we’re very proud of it, because it was devised, developed and designed by my staff, working with colleagues around DVLA,” Falvey explains. A GROW-YOUR-OWN PHILOSOPHY For people living in southwest Wales, the home of the DVLA, employment opportunities are often challenging to come by. Indeed, according to StatsWales, Swansea has an employment rate of 67.9%, making it within the bottom three areas within Wales. As such, staff tend to
stay with an employer for a number of years, making it even more important that the Agency invests in its employees and encourages continuous training and professional development. “We’ve very much got a grow-your-own philosophy. We do advertise jobs externally and we have brought in some external people but it’s relatively light. The great majority of our people have been developed and trained, and come through the ranks. I think that reflects the employment situation around here. There aren’t a lot of qualified procurement professionals around, and the ones who are, are working for other bodies and not necessarily able or willing to move,” Falvey advises. The DVLA employs over 5,000 people and is one of the largest employers in the region. “I’ve been here the last seven years, and we’ve
Working at the DVLA
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DVLA is based in Swansea, Wales
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lost very few staff. I think we’ve lost about three, maybe four professional, qualified staff in the last seven years, one of whom has come back to us, which is interesting. We’re adopting very much a grow-your-own, develop our own philosophy,” Falvey adds. Optimising operations A further significant project undertaken by DVLA Commercial has been around category management. “We completed a project over six months, called
Optimise, and that realigned our category management and restructured our teams to make sure that we were geared up to support the business. That’s been quite a big change,” Falvey comments. “We’ve run category management for some time, but this was updating it and refreshing it, and making our resource planning sharper, so that we’re better geared up for the inevitable peaks and troughs that go with the work. We’re
“If our systems at DVLA go down then about 4,000 people stop work, so availability is huge, resilience is massive” – Andrew Falvey, Commercial Director
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also involving senior colleagues more, which is improving internal business relationships.” Optimise, too, was a project where the staff at the DVLA took full control and ran it in-house. “I’m really proud that my staff have managed to do these things with little or no external support. I think that’s part of what makes the improvements even more significant, that we haven’t brought in armies of consultants, or teams of contractors to help us, we’ve done this ourselves,” Falvey says. A SIGNIFICANT INCOME GENERATOR Whilst the registration and licensing of both drivers and vehicles is what the DVLA is best known for, DVLA Commercial is involved in a much wider array of activities. “We undertake selling of our services. DVLA offers services to other parts of government. We produce cards for the Home Office for example. We also produce cards used by the freight industry. We undertake printing for other parts of government – we’re doing printing for GDS Notify, for example,” Falvey observes. “I’ve got a small team that handles where DVLA offers its services across government, or to other public bodies.” Personalised registrations are another area in which DVLA Commercial is involved. “We sell registration marks, which is an unusual activity in government. We’ve got a commercial website and I’ve got a small team that manages that as well, and that brings in about £100mn a year, so
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Registration and licensing of both drivers and vehicles is what the DVLA is best known for
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Oustdie DVLA’s main HQ in Swansea
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it’s a significant income generator,” states Falvey. That money goes to the Treasury, not to the DVLA. “It’s another interesting aspect of commercial activity at DVLA, which is one of the reasons I wanted to join, to be honest, because it’s never less than interesting,” continues Falvey. “When you talk to people, they assume that we’re the driving licence people, and we are, and you get your vehicle log book as people call it, the V5, from us as well. But as you can imagine, behind that there’s a lot of contracting, and a lot of goods and services to be procured.” SOLID DELIVERY Naturally, the ongoing transformation programme will be a key focus for the DVLA over the next few years, and the Agency has a strong sense of direction looking ahead. “It’s going to
take us a couple more years until we get to where we really want to be. But we’ve got a roadmap for where we want to go, and we want to become a multi-channel business, and I think we’re well on the way. I think what DVLA’s done in the last couple of years is start to build a reputation as one of the more solid delivery parts of government,” Falvey concludes.
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Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA), Longview Road, Morriston, Swansea SA6 7JL www.gov.uk/contact-the-dvla