ACES AAIA Catalog Enhanced Standard

ACES AAIA Catalog Enhanced Standard
The eCatalog Landscape has Changed | Next Generation Standards Announced at AAPEX

On the morning of November 3, a crowd of over 160 gathered in Las Vegas at the AAPEX show. The standing-room-only audience heard something they had waited a long time to hear. Representatives from Activant, Advance Auto, AutoZone and Wrenchead each said, in turn, effectively the same thing - they support the AAIA Catalog Enhanced Standard (ACES) and they all urged their suppliers and business partners to adopt the standard.

This announcement was significant because these parties rarely appear on the same stage together and almost never agree on business practices and technology standards. But, reflecting over three years of carefully coordinated development, the new AAIA standard for the exchange of applications catalog data is something that they can all agree upon. The significance to the industry is that finally, suppliers can organize and code their catalog data to a single standard and send essentially the same file to each of the leading e-catalog companies and retailers in the aftermarket. The savings to suppliers who are in the habit of coding the same data three to five different ways will be significant.

Scott Luckett, AAIA vice president for Technology Standards and Solutions observed, "by eliminating the non-productive, redundant effort required to map to multiple data formats, suppliers can focus all of their resources on perfecting the accuracy, completeness and timeliness of a single, standards-based, catalog data file. Full adoption of the new AAIA standard is an industry imperative for a healthy, competitive aftermarket."

The new AAIA standard, published October 30, 2003 includes a relational database of vehicle configurations, a hierarchy of parts classifications and an XML specification for machine-readable catalog data files. Tremendous attention to detail has gone into each component of the standard and sophisticated tools have been developed to support the standard for the long haul.

"New vehicles are released every month of the year," said Luckett, "and we had to create a collaborative online environment to research and publish this data in a timely fashion." The tool, developed by www.enhancedstandard.com, was developed by Technologue for AAIA and serves as the backbone of the new standard.

At the AAPEX event, Nick Porrini, Technologue president, explained the urgent need for the aftermarket to adopt the new AAIA standard. "The greatest threat to the aftermarket comes from the OE Dealer channel where real-time parts information is the weapon and increased parts revenue is the prize. The aftermarket cannot afford to waste time or money on proprietary standards. Technologue supports only one standard and we are betting on the aftermarket to change the landscape by adopting the AAIA format."

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