BATON ROUGE — Louisiana's Office of Motor Vehicles is replacing its decades-old technology with a new system called CHAMP.

The upgrade will support services like driver's licenses, identification cards, and other OMV transactions.

Thomas Mule of the Office of Technology Services described what the old setup looked like. "One of those screens was spinach green, so vintage '70s and '80s. And now it is all on one screen, and it is correct. That's there's no having to check back and forth between the 2 systems," Mule said.

The state says the change should cut processing times from hours to minutes. The upgrade comes after years of outages with the old system, including one that officials say was resolved quickly.

"So outages are managed entirely by CHAMP. So all the employees that they have on site and they're on site at OMV headquarters. Those people are going to be dealing with it around the clock," Mule said.

CHAMP now has staff at OMV headquarters to address problems in real time. State technology officials will continue to handle security and firewalls.

The state also expects the upgrade to help with training new employees. Keith Neal of the OMV explained how much faster that process has become.

"We have turnover in our offices, and the training for this old system would have taken three to six to even nine months, depending on the task at hand, to get you fully trained and get you well-versed in handling that transaction. And now we're talking about 24 hours. We can have an employee on the line actually helping customers," Neal said.

Officials say this is just the first phase of the upgrade.

"To make things more streamlined, we're going to see more and more items going online that you wouldn't have had you'd have had to come to the office for before, and we'll be able to do more things that are going to help the citizens out in the long run," Neal said.