PROBLEM

Overdue fines in the Ministry of Justice collections department debt fund totalled $454M. The tag line from the project sponsor was – ‘I get annoyed when I hear people on reality TV programmes say “put it on my tab”.’ The target audience was focussed around the non-criminal community who see traffic fines as a tax rather than criminality.

SOLUTION

Davanti provided ICT project management to deliver the technology component of the DLSO initiative. This involved developing the inter-agency technology solution, managing internal and external stakeholders, developing a workable project plan meeting legislative dates, and managing, developing and testing software through to production release.

Technical interface specifications were agreed with the inter-agency partners, including NZTA and the Police, where possible using existing interfaces.   The software was built by a mixed internal and external team, primarily on a JAVA code base.

The code was delivered with the ability for the Collection’s Department management to target particular groups rather than blanket the whole customer base. This enabled them to target big hitters in a co-ordinated approach using customisable parameters such as debt level or age of debt.

RESULT

The pre-project analysis proved to be correct and the majority of targeted customers paid up when confronted with the warning letter. In addition the marketing campaigns proved to be phenomenally successful, a significant number of people contacted the MOJ post viewing the TV adverts. This helped to ensure that the actual DLSO process targeted those customers most reticent to pay and that time and money was not unduly expended.

Upon going live the project starting delivering results almost immediately, in the first two months $1M of directly attributed and $5M of indirectly attributed revenue was gathered – against a first year benefit realisation target of $5M. The overall project cost was $1.4M.