Duplicate vehicles in the OPS-COM system can cause quite a bit of confusion especially when there is more than 1 driver for the specific vehicle. This article will discuss how to avoid this issue.

What are Duplicate Vehicles?

Vehicles in OPS-COM are unique based on plate, plate type, and state/province. Often, duplicates can appear in the system due to the plate type or location being recorded incorrectly . Duplicates can create headaches since two similar vehicles may generate duplicate entries when really they are the same vehicle.

Some scenarios that might require a vehicle merge are:

Duplicate vehicles created in the system due to mismatching vehicle information
Incorrect plate reads or plate numbers that were manually entered with an error
Correcting orphaned vehicles
Correcting orphaned violations

Unique Vehicle Identifiers

There are three items which create a unique identifier for a vehicle.

Licence Plate
Province / State
Plate Type

These three pieces of information are the minimum information you can include when entering a vehicle. For example: One might think that the plate number and state origin of the plate would be enough to make the vehicle unique in the system however this does not take into account the fact that a commercial plate number might repeat the same number sequence as a regular passenger vehicle plate. It is possible to have ABC123 as a passenger plate as well as ABC123 being used on a commercial plate. All three of these unique identifiers are required when inputting a vehicle in the system.

Entering Vehicles

The more information you supply when adding a vehicle the better the chance the system will work efficiently and warn you when you are adding a vehicle more than once.

The best way to ensure easy identification of specific vehicles is to also include the following information:

Vehicle Colour
Vehicle Make
Vehicle Model
Vehicle Year

It is good practice to instruct all Enforcement Officers to correct vehicle details if they notice they are incorrect while working in the field. This will help avoid duplicate vehicles getting into the system.

What are Duplicate Vehicles?

Unique Vehicle Identifiers

Entering Vehicles

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