TDCar: Transactional Platform for the Importation of New and Used Vehicles
Involved Institutions: Road Safety Council (COSEVI), Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MOPT), Ministry of Finance (Customs), National Property Registry, New vehicle importers, Used vehicle importers.
Proveedor: SOIN / RACSA
The Challenge:
Costa Rica faced a major issue related to the termination of the contract with the concessionary company responsible for Vehicle Technical Inspections, exposing the lack of these inspections for the population during several months. The impact on new and used vehicle importers was immediately perceived, causing multimillion-dollar losses. This situation also revealed the absence of a comprehensive and efficient platform to simplify vehicle verification processes at customs, exemption procedures, license plate number assignment, and vehicle technical inspections; generating delays, inefficiencies, and a lack of transparency in process tracking, negatively impacting importers and the involved institutions.
The pressing need of our potential clients is clear: they require a solution that simplifies and accelerates vehicle import procedures, ensuring transparency, process efficiency, and the implementation of continuous notifications throughout the entire process.
Likewise, as this is a nationwide platform, it is necessary to implement high levels of security to guarantee the integrity of vehicle importers’ information in Costa Rica, ensure 24/7 service availability, and, in addition, provide a low-cost, scalable, and highly reliable infrastructure platform for the Costa Rican State.
Our solution:
• TDCar is a platform that integrates all procedures related to vehicle importation into a single solution. Our software has been specifically designed to provide a smooth and hassle-free experience for importers and the institutions involved.
• TDCar simplifies the vehicle verification process at customs, saving time and reducing bureaucracy. In addition, it automates exemption procedures, accelerates the import process, and minimizes errors, preventing unnecessary delays.
• One of TDCar’s most outstanding features is its ability to provide continuous process tracking through real-time notifications. This offers users and involved institutions the transparency and visibility required to maintain full control over the vehicle importation process.
• Likewise, to ensure rapid deployment of variable-cost infrastructure, guaranteeing service availability and scalability in response to high application demand and the need for appropriate security levels for a nationwide platform, AWS cloud services were chosen due to their vast ecosystem of services and high global availability.
Results:
• Since its implementation, more than 100,000 vehicles have been successfully processed, with satisfied users totaling 4,451.
• More than 43,000 procedures have been completed without issues. These numbers speak for themselves and demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution in the market.
• Software that simplifies and accelerates procedures, provides transparency and continuous notifications, and has consistently demonstrated positive results.
• Implementation of a high-availability infrastructure aligned with nationwide user needs.
Technologies used:
• Amazon WAF: for protecting the platform against potential cyberattacks, filtering incoming web traffic, among others.
• Amazon RDS for Oracle: for storing information related to the configuration of services associated with payment transactions.
• Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL: for storing vehicle import procedure information.
• Amazon EC2: to host the developed valuation and billing system, as well as the TDCar platform.
• Amazon API Gateway: to host serverless services and provide an integration API for third parties.
• Amazon Lambda: technology used for developing serverless microservices for integration and automatic application auto-scaling.
• Amazon S3: for storing large volumes of unstructured information and files.
• Amazon Cloudtrail: using operational risk auditing, governance, and compliance processes.
• Back-end programming languages: Java, Node.js, Coldfusion.
• Front-end JavaScript-based libraries: React.js.
