Global standards, regional standards, communication standards, document standards, the list is endless, no wonder the automotive companies are finding it difficult to develop their global B2B infrastructures.  Today’s IT managers face a daunting challenge when told by their management teams to integrate an overseas operation into their B2B infrastructure. 

This all started many years ago with the introduction of the American ANSI and UN EDIFACT standards.  The regional industry associations then emerged and wanted standards developed for their respective regions.  Today, EDIFACT is one of the main document standards used across the global automotive industry and OFTP is one of the most popular communication protocols in use.  OFTP, developed by ODETTE, has been in use since the late 80s and in recent years has come under increasing pressure from internet based communication standards.  There are still inherent security issues with transferring sensitive design and engineering data across the internet and to try and plug the security holes, ODETTE have been working on OFTP version 2.  OFTP v2 offers an interesting alternative for companies wishing to exploit the web for data communication.  A combination of encrypted messages and digital signatures ensures near complete security of transmitted messages across the internet.  With the increased security features, there are a number of OEMs who are testing OFTP v2, but given the past security related issues of trading across the internet, it may take some time for the automotive industry to gain trust in using this new standard. 

The manufacturing industry is unique as it is not just purchasing and logistics related EDI transactions that take place between trading partners, many of these companies need to share engineering and design related information amongst their trading partners as well.  The main problem with design related information is that it is very large in terms of file size, you are talking about a requirement to transfer giga-bytes of information across a network.  Combined with this, you have the added problem of each region having a different standard for transferring engineering data between an OEM and its design teams.   In Europe for example, ENGDAT is regarded as the standard for transferring Computer Aided Design (CAD) models via EDI.  In the U.S and in Japan there are other home grown standards for transferring CAD models.  Given that car manufacturing is a global business, you would think that car companies would be rushing to agree on a global standard for engineering related data exchange.  It is only in the last few months that AIAG, ODETTE, JAMA and STAR have finally agreed on a global standard called the Joint Automotive Data Model (JADM).  This is an attempt to try and synchronise global XML standards, automotive business processes and associated data entities.  If JADM is successfully developed and deployed then it stands to totally change the way in which automotive companies share engineering information around the world.  More importantly it will be one less B2B integration problem to have to worry about, well for the moment at least!