AIAG makes progress with IV&I project

This month the Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG) expects to complete initial testing as part of the proof of concept on its Inventory Visibility and Interoperability (IV&I) project—an ambitious program that will provide suppliers and OEMs with standards that cut across proprietary inventory management systems and help solve supply chain communication issues.

According to Pat Snack, an AIAG director, IV&I grew out of a town hall meeting in 2002. "There was a lot of concern about the use of multiple systems in use throughout the supply chain."

Cosponsored by the Original Equipment Supplier Association (OESA) Odette, an industry association of European automotive manufacturers, the IV&I project involves a host of enterprise and e-commerce software vendors and other partners—including QAD, SAP, Oracle, Sterling Commerce, and others—that will build support for the IV&I standard into their offerings.

The IV&I project is targeted at trading partner interactions such as inventory replenishment signals. The first phase focuses on defining the business processes related to MIN/MAX inventory levels, in which suppliers may access customers' inventory data to ascertain whether materials on hand are within acceptable levels and respond accordingly.

Says Snack, "Our goal is to create a couple of levels of interoperability at the payload and transport levels to eliminate the manual rekeying of data. It becomes error-proof if you can transmit data directly [from one system to another]. It also avoids requiring trading partners to make investments in multiple software tools that perform the same function to satisfy a customer requirement."

According to Snack, the IV&I standards will be open architected and utilize OAGIS Business Object Documents (BODs) for XML. The proof of concept uses some early development work on protocols and information flows. Between May and August, says Terry Onica, QAD's automotive strategy manager and cochair of the IV&I work group, the project's interoperability protocols should be complete and available to the partners.

Onica believes the project might eventually gain traction in other verticals. "Obviously there is a lot of benefit for [anyone wrestling with interoperability problems]. Once we do the proof of concept, I think other industries will want to experience that benefit. They have to be running into the same frustrations."