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The DVLA logoDriver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)

UK government agency delivers millions of driving licenses to UK customers on time with print management solutions from Ricoh and OpenText™

The DVLA logo

About the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA)

An agency within the UK Department for Transport, DVLA ensures the right drivers and vehicles are taxed simply, safely, and efficiently. DVLA maintains driver and vehicle registration and licensing and collects and enforces Vehicle Excise Duty.

A girl driving a car
  • Driver records:
    50 million
  • Documents issued:
    500,000/day
  • Employees:
    6,000 full- and part-time staff

Summary

Challenges

  • 100 million driving-related documents to print every year, or 500,000 per day.
  • Documents must be printed and mailed to customers within just 24 hours of receiving data.
  • Existing estate of production print equipment and print management software approaching end-of-life.

Solution

  • Replaced legacy systems with a modern print solution.
  • Streamlined and automated print processes.

Results

  • performance-gauge Met 24-hour SLAs from the UK government
  • asset-management Reduced postage costs and ensured traceability
  • asset-management Supported rapidly growing print volumes

Challenges

  • 100 million driving-related documents to print every year, or 500,000 per day
  • Documents must be printed and mailed to customers within just 24 hours of receiving data
  • Existing estate of production print equipment and print management software approaching end-of-life

Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) is one of the UK’s largest data, print, and mailing operations, producing over 100 million customer-facing documents a year. Based in Swansea, Wales, the organization’s Output Services Group (OSG) produces a range of documents, including paper and photocard driving licenses, vehicle registration certificates, reminder letters for drivers, and many more.

With the production print equipment at OSG approaching end-of-life, DVLA looked for a new print solution to support its mission-critical services. The organization targeted a solution that offered high reliability, responsive vendor support, and low-touch management—enabling OSG to meet stringent service-level agreements (SLAs) for mailing out documents to customers.

Person using a laptop

Ricoh ProcessDirector is really the brains behind our operation and is ideal for the type and volume of work we do at DVLA. It enables us to track print jobs across all our devices, so we know where every mail item is at any point in the system. OpenText Communications supports it via an easy and flexible way of creating customer communications that are digitally delivered by Ricoh solutions.

Jonathan Gordon
OSG IT Development Manager, Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

Solution

Following a public tender, DVLA selected production print solutions from Ricoh. Managed using Ricoh ProcessDirector™—supported by OpenText™ Communications (formerly Exstream™) software for document composition and formatting—the solution helps the organization deliver key documents to millions of customers and partners.

Products Deployed

  • OpenText™ Communications

    Eliminate silos and enable marketing, communications, and customer service to work together to deliver true omnichannel experiences

Replacing legacy systems with a modern print solution

Working with Ricoh, DVLA implemented a Ricoh Graphic Communications solution based on four continuous-feed, high-speed printers and two digital inkjet color presses. Jonathan Gordon, OSG IT development manager at DVLA, said, “Ricoh ProcessDirector is really the brains behind our operation and is ideal for the type and volume of work we do at DVLA. The solution enables us to track print jobs across all our devices, so we know where every mail item is at any point in the system.”

Streamlining and automating print processes

Using Ricoh ProcessDirector, DVLA can spin up new print projects easily, track every document throughout the lifecycle, and create fine-grained reports to support billing- and compliance-related activities.

Gordon added, “With Ricoh ProcessDirector—supported by OpenText Communications—we can create workflows tailored to the type of data and documents involved in each project. This capability is very useful, because it means we can be much more self-sufficient when it comes to making changes to our print jobs.”

Man looking at mobile phone in transit

We chose OpenText Communications to complement Ricoh ProcessDirector because of its core strengths in creating communications in a fast, flexible manner, integration capabilities which are key to the end-to-end solution and the fact it is an industry leading application in the market. It helped us deliver on very specific requirements for the DVLA.

Steven Downes
Solutions Architect and Support Manager, Ricoh UK

Results

Today, Ricoh ProcessDirector, enhanced with capabilities from OpenText, plays a vital role in the delivery of photocard driving licenses in the UK. Each year, OSG uses the solution to process data on 100 million driving-related documents.

Met 24-hour SLAs from the UK government

Through its partnership with Ricoh, DVLA can meet and exceed stringent SLAs set by the UK Secretary of State. OSG has a 24-hour window from receiving data to mailing documents to customers, and typically produces and mails documents within just 12 hours—50 percent faster than its SLA.

“As a strategic supplier for DVLA, Ricoh helps us support the on-time delivery of millions of documents to customers across the UK,” said Graham. “Print management capabilities from Ricoh, supported by OpenText are essential to what we do. Without Ricoh ProcessDirector, we could not process our massive volumes of work or meet the SLAs set by the government departments we serve.”

Reduced postage costs and ensuring traceability

Using Ricoh ProcessDirector, DVLA is streamlining and automating core data management processes. For example, the solution allows the organization to identify situations where multiple documents to a single recipient can be combined in a single envelope—helping to reduce postage costs.

Crucially, the solution helps DVLA to maintain a clear audit trail of every transaction, helping the organization to ensure that every document is processed, printed, and mailed out in a timely manner. Graham confirmed, “Thanks to the end-to-end solution provided by Ricoh ProcessDirector, we can say with a high degree of confidence that each transaction, license document, and card was processed, enveloped, and sent to customers successfully.”

Supported rapidly growing print volumes

Looking to the future, the new solution will help DVLA to expand its services to include other government departments and organizations. OSG has already expanded its print volumes for one department from 139,000 to 13 million items per year—a figure that is set to grow by 30 percent year-on-year.

 

Graham concluded, “The flexibility of the Ricoh, supported by OpenText solution allows us to manage the large volume and complexity of data we receive and process transactions quickly.”

To learn more about this case study, visit Ricoh.

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