RDW – ‘Surveillance of Manufacturers’
The company RDW is an independent government organization. This means that it receives objectives from the minister of infrastructure, but they themselves determine how to achieve these objectives. The department we focus on is ‘Toezicht fabrikanten’ which translates to ‘Surveillance of Manufacturers’. The main goal of this department is to make sure that vehicles and vehicle components are safe to use. They check this by doing audits at the manufacturers and also by looking at their work processes. When manufacturers comply with all the requirements set by the RDW, they receive a certificate and are allowed to produce and sell their product.
The RDW uses a risk scale to determine what kind of monitoring is necessary for the manufacturer. In case of a high risk manufacturer, an audit will be performed. While in case of a low risk manufacturer, only desk research will be conducted.
Current IT systems and workflow
This whole process may sound quite straightforward. However, the systems that are needed to perform the job, make it quite difficult. The main problem is that the systems cannot communicate with one another. The employee has to use spreadsheets to link the systems together. This is done manually, and takes a lot of time, while also subjecting the process to a variety of other issues. Completed documents uploaded to the system can easily be modified without these changes being tracked. Since the data needs to transfer from system to system, it is prone to bugs and often causes errors.
DRIVE
Within the RDW a project called DRIVE has been developed and has just been kicked off. This project aims to digitize the work processes within the RDW. At the department of Surveillance of Manufacturers, they use the term ‘Erkenningen Register’ as part of the project DRIVE that is relevant for their department. Erkenningen Register translates to ‘Recognition Register’. The main goals of the digital transformation is to make work processes more time efficient and prevent errors caused by data transference. Another goal is to make the communication with the manufacturers easier and not dependent on e-mail. The steps that need to be taken to achieve these goals are:
- Switching to ERP systems; Connect the current systems into one system. This means that data is no longer transferred manually, which is more time efficient and errors in data transfer will be minimized.
- Big data; all data needs to be stored in such a way that large scale analytics is possible.
- Mobilization of business processes; There will no longer be the need to manually transfer data from the office to a laptop. But data will be synchronized automatically between devices. This will make processes more efficient and less error prone.
- Web portal for manufacturers; This will make the communication with the manufacturers easier and more efficient, since emails will no longer be overlooked.
Implementing these adjustments will make the work processes more time efficient, so the throughput time for the certification of manufacturers will be shortened. This will make it possible for the RDW to keep serving the growing amount of manufacturers.
