Tennessee upgrades with new car titling, registration system

Tennessee Motor Vehicles Department employees will have an easier time tracking and maintaining residents’ vehicle title and registration information thanks to a new $14.2 million system the state will install over the next three years. State officials hired Covansys Corp. of Farmington Hills, Mich., to install its Web titling and registration system in all of its 95 counties by February 2004. The system will start in five pilot sites by November next year.“The new system will cut down the time it takes to process this information from weeks to days,” said Bill Ezell, director of systems development and support for the Finance and Administration Department of Tennessee. “Databases in the current system would get corrupted and out of synchronization, and just didn’t work very well.”The current system, written in Cobol, forced Motor Vehicles Department employees to enter data manually and perform batch processing. And it never spread entirely across the state—29 counties have no computerized system.Covansys’ system will reside on a combination of servers running Microsoft Windows NT and Sun Microsystems Solaris. All information will be stored on Oracle 8i databases. Covansys will use Oracle development tools to design the Web front end using a mix of Java and HTML. Residents also will be able to pay for title and registration online via credit card and DMV workers will scan documents to store and be able to tap into the driver’s license database.Officials forecast the system will accommodate up to 6 million renewals annually.