Bart Noyes, in addition to his duties as CIO at Interamerican Motor Corp., is also one year into a two-year term as chair of the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association's Technology Standards & Solutions Committee. He spoke to Aftermarket Business World about the Committee's accomplishments and goals for the new year.
What do you think have been the most important accomplishments of the AAIA Technology Committee this year?
I believe that would be the Internet Parts Ordering (IPO) standard version 2. Along the way in the last decade we went through the first wave of figuring out the language of the aftermarket, speaking in ACES and PIES. Now our efforts are all about putting pipes in that will allow people to speak together easily. IPO v.2 was the biggest development that I saw this year, and that allows people to actually transact in real time between companies. That's been a pretty exciting development.
There were also developments in Othermotive. A lot of people in our industry also sell motorcycles and wave runners and other things that are associated with automotive. We've added that to ACES, allowing them to transact with that data.
The stuff that's going on in telematics is very exciting. Getting aftermarket players to be able to use our standards to participate in that telematics story, where the dealer has an edge right now in communicating with the customer's vehicle. We've got a very good solution there.
What's next as far as your work in the othermotive space?
ACES came first. Our next goal will be looking at how PIES can go down that route as well. We did some really good work in just defining what those vehicles are in ACES; with the PIES initiative, there are enough general product categories that it should be fairly flexible in addressing othermotive needs as well. Right now we're just getting the basic vehicles in place.
What are the committee's priorities for next year?
We've tested IPO v.2 between a couple of trading partners, and we'll make sure we're shepherding that adoption. One initiative will be content on demand, so that we're doing catalog look-ups for folks outside of their catalogs as opposed to force-feeding data all the time. Speaking for my own company, not just the committee, we're getting more requests for content on demand. It's nice to be able to receive catalogs and those updates, but we're really looking for real-time information — let me feed you a year/make/model and you return what I need in real time.
We want to continue to expand PIES and focus on adoption. We've been a moving target for a long time. Now we want to focus on getting the message out that here's the language, here are the pipes, let's use this thing. If we just continue to develop the standards, it's hard for people to get on the bus. We're releasing standards with more discipline than in the past.
We're also insisting that any transactional spec that is released be fully tested between two trading partners before it is released to the industry. In the past we designed something and let the early adopter take the lumps. Now, two trading partners implement it with the close support of the AAIA Technical Advisor. This provides additional support to the very early adopter and also encourages companies that need to move fast to be able to do so, and the industry can follow with less pain. This is what we did with IPO v.2, and we will continue this practice going forward, which should speed adoption.
What do you think will be the biggest challenges moving forward?
There's just such a variety of channels in the aftermarket. We need standard bridges so that we don't have to customize every time we have a customer communication. The complexity of cataloging has always been huge, but the variety of sales channels is growing in complexity. If we stick to standard bridges, and leverage the investment we've made, you can really see things take off.
Bart Noyes, in addition to his duties as CIO at Interamerican Motor Corp., is also one year into a two-year term as chair of the Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association's Technology Standards & Solutions Committee. He spoke to Aftermarket Business World about the Committee's accomplishments and goals for the new year.
What do you think have been the most important accomplishments of the AAIA Technology Committee this year?
I believe that would be the Internet Parts Ordering (IPO) standard version 2. Along the way in the last decade we went through the first wave of figuring out the language of the aftermarket, speaking in ACES and PIES. Now our efforts are all about putting pipes in that will allow people to speak together easily. IPO v.2 was the biggest development that I saw this year, and that allows people to actually transact in real time between companies. That's been a pretty exciting development.
There were also developments in Othermotive. A lot of people in our industry also sell motorcycles and wave runners and other things that are associated with automotive. We've added that to ACES, allowing them to transact with that data.
The stuff that's going on in telematics is very exciting. Getting aftermarket players to be able to use our standards to participate in that telematics story, where the dealer has an edge right now in communicating with the customer's vehicle. We've got a very good solution there.
What's next as far as your work in the othermotive space?
ACES came first. Our next goal will be looking at how PIES can go down that route as well. We did some really good work in just defining what those vehicles are in ACES; with the PIES initiative, there are enough general product categories that it should be fairly flexible in addressing othermotive needs as well. Right now we're just getting the basic vehicles in place.
{C}What are the committee's priorities for next year?
We've tested IPO v.2 between a couple of trading partners, and we'll make sure we're shepherding that adoption. One initiative will be content on demand, so that we're doing catalog look-ups for folks outside of their catalogs as opposed to force-feeding data all the time. Speaking for my own company, not just the committee, we're getting more requests for content on demand. It's nice to be able to receive catalogs and those updates, but we're really looking for real-time information — let me feed you a year/make/model and you return what I need in real time.
We want to continue to expand PIES and focus on adoption. We've been a moving target for a long time. Now we want to focus on getting the message out that here's the language, here are the pipes, let's use this thing. If we just continue to develop the standards, it's hard for people to get on the bus. We're releasing standards with more discipline than in the past.
We're also insisting that any transactional spec that is released be fully tested between two trading partners before it is released to the industry. In the past we designed something and let the early adopter take the lumps. Now, two trading partners implement it with the close support of the AAIA Technical Advisor. This provides additional support to the very early adopter and also encourages companies that need to move fast to be able to do so, and the industry can follow with less pain. This is what we did with IPO v.2, and we will continue this practice going forward, which should speed adoption.
What do you think will be the biggest challenges moving forward?
There's just such a variety of channels in the aftermarket. We need standard bridges so that we don't have to customize every time we have a customer communication. The complexity of cataloging has always been huge, but the variety of sales channels is growing in complexity. If we stick to standard bridges, and leverage the investment we've made, you can really see things take off.
