Puspakom making great strides – CEO

KUALA LUMPUR: Puspakom has made great strides in its operational capacity and efficiency in the 24 years it has been in existence as the national inspection company to undertake mandatory inspections of both commercial and private motor vehicles, said its chief executive officer.

Mohammed Shukor Ismail said these had been achieved at great costs to double its infrastructure and resources to cope with the huge increase in demand for vehicle inspections which rose from 500,000 to three million a year during the period.

A wholly owned subsidiary of DRB-HICOM Berhad, Puspakom's main roles are to conduct inspection on vehicles to ensure their safety and roadworthiness as well as compliance with the regulations on preserving the environment via emission tests.

It runs a nation-wide network of 56 full-fledged and well-equipped inspection centres complemented by more than 25 inspection visiting sites that provide inspection services in the less populated and rural areas.

Shukor told Bernama that the waiting time for customers to get their vehicles inspected had been reduced from four to five hours previously to less than one hour now.

Besides this, innovations to enhance customer experience had been introduced such as online reservation and payment solution while appointments can be made through simple and easy application known as MyPuspakom.

"Reducing the waiting time to less than an hour is a big achievement or more than 70 percent for us. The service in Puspakom is about the waiting time, talking about how long we have to wait," he said.

The main focus had been on manpower followed by machines and the systems towards achieving customer convenience and satisfaction.

"We have to increase our manpower from less than 600 when we started to more than 1,400 now who are all trained and certified to do vehicle inspection under whatever procedures required.