ACES After 5 Years

Before I get into all the great things going on with ACES since last year, I know some of you are wondering just what happened to my hand. It was unfortunately my first day out skiing over Spring Break. I was feeling pretty good when I took a tumble. Luckily, my wife just happened to be taking a picture when it happened…

Nice spider suit, huh? …Actually, I fell down on a flat hill going about one mph! Very embarrassing.

It’s hard to believe that the ACES standard turns 5 years this Summer. It’s no longer time to “wait and see.” The spec is stable, it has changed very little in those 5 years and all changes have been upward compatible.

It is ready for prime time. I believe this will truly be the year of adoption. If you haven’t started yet, you’re going to be left behind. (In case you’re wondering, this is the way we make our birthday cakes in Saint Louis.)

I wanted to talk a little about the committee that creates and maintains these standards for the industry. The Technology Standards and Solutions Committee is one of nine Standing Committees in the Association. Other committees include Government Affairs, Education, Market Research and the AAPEX Show.

The Technology committee is led by Mike Williams, the VP of Advanced Technologies at O’Reilly. Since Mike had some serious health issues last year, Mark Hickman who is the VP of Point of Sale Systems at Advance Auto Parts helped out in the newly formed Vice Chairman position.

The Staff Liaison is the venerable Scott Luckett. Many of you know Scott from previous appearances at NCMA conferences…

Here he is in one of his more memorable performances…

There are a total of 29 members on the Committee. I thought it might be interesting to break these members down into several categories. You can see that we have good representation across all business types.

Note that two of the members are considered non-voting “Vendor Advisors” because they provide paid services to the Committee. These companies are Technologue and Prescient Technologies (Joe Register).

One interesting development over the past year or so was a special interest group that was informally formed calling themselves the “Receivers Group.”

The Receivers Group is made up of seven retailers and two ecat companies.

The “Receivers Group” first met February 2006 in Atlanta. Their stated purpose is to “put some momentum behind the ACES standard” and to “stabilize … and enhance its usability for the Aftermarket”.

Now, just because I chose a picture of some counter-culture hippies and twisted that picture a little off-kilter, should in no way be construed as a reflection of my true feelings for this group.

Just kidding… Actually, several initiatives have come out of this collaboration and the fact that they are all speaking with one clear voice is a good thing.

The ACES subcommittee started using an on-line collaboration tool called Basecamp back in October 2005 to organize, coordinate and document our work. This tool has now been picked up by the other subcommittees and is a great way to participate in the design and direction of the standards.

Running a volunteer committee has been described as being a little like “herding cats.” With this tool, we can at least keep our eye on the ball.

I would encourage all of you to ask Scott or me for a login. Even if you don’t want to contribute, it’s a great resource to keep up with what’s going on.

Of course, the other way we get things done is over the phone. This is especially good for bringing up new issues and when there doesn’t seem to be a good understanding of what we are trying to accomplish.

These discussions are often continued on Basecamp where rational thought, in theory, should be forced by the medium. We had 15 of those calls this past year, just on ACES topics.

Normally AAIA only meets twice a year at the Spring and Fall Leadership Days. The Technology Committee has been adding a third meeting to this schedule because we have had so much to vote on.

The way the calendar worked this year, we actually fit in another one between NCMA meetings. I’d like to tell you some of the highlights of each of those four meetings…

Last May, we met in beautiful Huntington Beach California. That was the first time I’d ever stayed in a Westin “Heavenly Bed”, and it was really a very good night’s sleep. I highly recommend it.

But that wasn’t the best part of the meetings. This was where the Receiver Group really stepped forward and said that we needed to make sure the foundations of the standard were solid before we did anything else.

This was the genesis for the idea of a Vehicle Table audit against other well-respected tables in the Industry.

Another pivotal decision made at that meeting was the enhanced role Technologue would take in making time-critical decisions. It was felt that the existing review process, while democratic, took too long.

For a trial period, Technologue would make ALL Qdb submission decisions (basically just keeping out duplicates), and ALL PCdb decisions (using industry experts when needed).

It was also decided, after much debate, that all reasonable “Positions” would be accepted as valid. Since that time, this process has proven to be a good one and will be continued.

The September meeting in Denver strayed from our normal format. A smaller 14 person strategic planning meeting was held in the morning instead of our traditional all-day ACES subcommittee meeting.

This group discussed the results of the industry-wide survey sponsored by AAIA, AASA and SEMA and other issues impacted by technology.

Adoption of the existing standards arose as a key issue that needed to be addressed, and the group made good progress on designing a campaign to increase education and awareness of the benefits of the standards… especially among top-level decision makers.

We also decided to formalize the vehicle table audit process recommended by the Receiver Group.

As of today, Wrenchead, Activant and Carquest have completed their audit and submitted their results to Technologue. Autozone and NAPA will also perform an audit against their tables.

Everyone on the Committee, whether a Supplier, Receiver or Solution Provider, wants the same thing… to drive out costs and sell more parts.

To help focus our directions and initiatives, a “Strategic Planning and Thinking Exercise” was held during the first day of meetings in Vegas.

Here are some of the ideas that came from those discussions:

• Make sure the standards are sufficient and complete… and document them like crazy.
• Training is key. The standards help communicate your data, but they don’t keep you from sending junk.
• The solution providers are good for the industry. They provide education and tools that you might not be able to create yourselves. Use this important resource.
• The suppliers and receivers are business partners. They should help each other.
• I’ve mentioned awareness as a key initiative, and what the AAIA will be doing in the months to come will help with this greatly.

And finally, we need to stop supporting two standards. This has been a topic of great debate within the Committee. The Receiver Group has committed to 5 years. I’m certain it will disappear on it own well before that date.

Three people from TecDoc flew over from Germany to talk about their experiences. They have a different environment in Europe, but many of the data issues are the same.

What struck me most about their presentation was their sense of urgency and focus on competing against the OE. They’ve also had good experience with “Quality Workshops” to help train their data suppliers.

Another way that they are working to drive out cost, is to create and maintain generic graphics for the industry that all supplies will use.

Just last week we met in Phoenix. The second day was interesting because we saw the Standards at work. We saw everything from IPO to iSHOP to PartnerSHIP Network to PIES on Demand.

Ben Johnson from Delphi actually showed a hand held device running iSHOP 3.0 communicating wirelessly with a diagnostic tool hooked up to a car in the parking lot. Very cool stuff.

One theme which came through again and again in Phoenix was that our real competition was not sitting in that room.

And maybe the most exciting presentation was given by Worldpac. It was titled “ACES in Action —Myth Buster— GPI Next Generation Catalog”.

Their message was that the standards are ready today. They just finished a two year project to convert all their systems to 100% native ACES.

They demonstrated their catalog lookup system and showed that there’s plenty of room to innovate around the great foundation supplied by the VCdb and PCdb.

And finally, they reported that Carquest will also be going on-line with their ACES based system in three months.

Chris Gardner showed preliminary results from a survey they’re conducting for their members to see what data their partners require.

This is very similar to an initiative that got tentative approval in our ACES meeting to publicly post what version of the standard a company can create or what they will receive.

It was felt that we needed some way to track adoption of the standards and this would be a great way of doing that.

So, what have we done this year?

Thanks to Amazon, we now have vehicles going back to 1896. At this point, it is only Base Vehicle information (Year/Make/Model). These are not available in Legacy coding.

Technologue in cooperation with Federal-Mogul, Polk and NAPA have added about 1800 medium duty vehicles to the VCdb. These are not available in Legacy coding.

We released version 2.0 of the delivery specification. Enhancements were primarily made to support the new Qualifier Database.

(I see that got your attention…)

SEMA has been participating in both ACES and PIES standards development and this is a very welcome addition. They launched their own data delivery pilot with several companies to see what deficiencies, if any, performance and accessory companies find with the standards.

I’m not quite sure what this ad has to do with high-performance differentials, but it seems like the way things are done on that side of the business… So, welcome to the party.

This is great news for the Industry and should offer increased resources for our efforts.

We have several things on our plate for this year:

• Now that Technologue has access to Motor Information Systems, the idea of using some of their product and vehicle images in the tables has been proposed. The idea is that a picture can help remove any confusion about a part type or body style.
• We have tried to get motorcyle and ATV data in the past, but now there is renewed interest in this segment.
• ACES is looking to include application images and other digital media in our specification.
• One effort many of you will be happy to hear about is the consolidation of many of the existing flat file formats into one. This would not take the place of ACES and PIES, but could be a stepping stone for some. We are working to make the fields and order identical to their big brother specifications.
• I won’t say any more about Training and Awareness because I think Kathleen will be talking about that in her AAIA Update tomorrow.
• And finally, I already mentioned the public “Adoption Grid” idea that we are working on.

So there’s lots going on in the world of ACES. Please remember that this is an effort run by volunteers. It only works if you participate.

If you don’t like something, don’t sit back and complain. Take a stand and let yourself be heard. This standard only works if we are all behind it.

Any questions? Thank You.