Case Study: California Department of Motor Vehicles achieves centralized, automated vehicle registration fee calculations and legacy-system modernization with FICO Blaze Advisor

FICO Blaze Advisor drives modernization of legacy systems at the California Department of Motor Vehicles

The California Department of Motor Vehicles, which collects roughly $4.1 billion in vehicle-registration fees each year, was hampered by inconsistent fee calculations spread across two legacy systems (an IBM EDL system in 167 field offices and a COBOL mainframe batch system). Duplicate code, disparate platforms, and decades of ad-hoc updates made changes slow, error-prone, and unable to meet legislated deadlines or scale for new requirements.

The DMV implemented FICO Blaze Advisor as a centralized business-rules management system (with Java/J2EE and IBM WebSphere) so non-technical analysts can define, test and deploy fee rules via web interfaces. Rolled out in phases (vessels Mar 2003; reg-penalty fees Apr 2003 processing 60–75k/day; full vehicle rules Feb 2005 with ~2,100 rules handling several hundred thousand transactions daily), the solution automated statewide fee calculations, improved consistency and agility for legislative changes, reduced costs, and enabled a public online fee calculator.

California Department of Motor Vehicles

Jim Mclean

Senior Analyst