Ontario Driver Examination Services – 2nd Generation

Under an agreement with the Ministry of Transportation of Ontario (MTO), Plenary will deliver Driver Examination Services for its road user program for a 10-year term.

Plenary, in conjunction with its consortium partner Serco Inc., will deliver the services for the provision of knowledge tests, vision tests and road tests across 13 licence categories. Plenary is also responsible for collecting fees in respect of those services.

Currently delivered at approximately 95 testing centres across the province, by around 500 full-time equivalent staff. The Driver Examination Services are relied on by Ontarians aged 16 and older to provide administration and testing services required as part of the licence issuance process and licence renewal process for specific types/classes of licences.

Each year, the existing service delivery network processes around 575,000 knowledge tests, 675,000 road tests and exchanges over 90,000 licences from other jurisdictions, with further ongoing responses to customer inquiries and resolves customer complaints.

Some services have an MTO-regulated fee associated for the service delivered (e.g. knowledge test, road tests, Driver Instructor Application, etc), while other services are provided free of charge (e.g. road test booking, accepting a medical report, changing licence conditions, data entry of test results from Driver Certification Program, resolving complaints, etc).

The contract is projected to generate an estimated $800 million in shared revenues over its term and includes a revenue sharing mechanism with the Province.

Design features

In addition to the core Driver Examination Services, Plenary Properties DES LP will be upgrading existing information technology elements to reflect modernization of the Road Test Booking and Driver Testing systems. These upgrades includ;

• secure data-exchange into MTO back-office systems; and
• ongoing upgrade and support of MTO hardware in all Drive Test centres including LAN, WAN, Point of Sale Terminals and printers.

Local economic impacts

Driver Examination Services are delivered at approximately 95 testing centres across the province by around 500 full-time equivalent staff. Through this contract, additional opportunities in the IT sector are being created for Ontarians to modernize Driver Examination Services.