Industry Insight
—John Yoswick is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon, who has a body shop in the family and has been writing about the automotive industry since 1988. He is the editor of the weekly CRASH Network (for a free 4-week trial subscription, visit www.CrashNetwork.com). Contact him by email at jyoswick@SpiritOne.com.
CIC Committee Offers Industry a Way to Push for Use of Better Data Standard with John Yoswick
A Collision Industry Conference (CIC) mate – including customer, vehicle, committee is making yet another call parts and labor information—but the for widespread adoption of an imBMS standard makes it easier for shops proved standard for the exchange of esto protect the privacy of data for cuswith Ed Attanasio timate information among shops, tomers, business partners and theminsurers and suppliers. selves. A parts vendor, for example, For several years, CIC committees doesn’t need all the data but an EMS worked to educate the industry on the file sent to that vendor essentially indifference between the “EMS stancludes all the information from the esdard”—developed timate. in theEd 1990s to esAt the CIC meeting in Detroit, with Attanasio sentially allow estiJack Rozint of the CIC E-Commerce / mate data from any Data Privacy committee said that if a compliant estimatshop is working on a celebrity’s vehiing system to flow cle, for example, ordering parts for that into shop managevehicle using the EMS essentially transments systems—to mits that celebrity’s name and home adJack Rozint the more sophistidress to the parts supplier. with Ed Attanasio “BMS takes care of all that and cated “BMS standard.” BMS offers not only the transfer of was designed specifically so you can more data among those using estimate define which data goes where,” Rozint data, but more importantly it offers said. Widespread implementation of the shops far more control over the data BMS could eliminate some of the reshared with other parties. The EMS keying of data the industry is doing to Attanasio standard transferswith all dataEd from the estiuse multiple applications, Rozint said.
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And it could eliminate the need for some of those redundant applications. “With BMS fully implemented in an accessible form, I might not need five parts ordering systems,” Rozint said. “I may be able to pick the one that works best and meet the needs of a number of insurers.”
Implementations have been limited Rozint said it’s not that BMS has not been implemented at all; it’s just been done in limited ways among particular business partners in the industry. “The data gets output in [BMS] format, but it’s controlled by the information provider,” Rozint said of these limited implementations of BMS. “The only third-parties that can access your [BMS] data are ones approved or somehow otherwise allowed to by the information providers since they’re maintaining control of that data.” What’s been lacking, Rozint said, is widespread implementation of BMS
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in a way that gives the user ultimate control over the flow of that data to different partners. “If BMS was available in a much more accessible format, we’d have much more data about everything that happened on a repair,” Rozint said. “We’d know, for example, what parts delays occurred and what was the cause of the parts delays.” Rozint said the committee has developed some policy statements that they say shops or insurers who want to see more widespread implementation of BMS could use to push the information providers to make that happen. A collision repair organization, for example, could tell their estimating system provide: “In order to be considered for use in our operations (except where we are under insurer mandate) and for all future contract renewals, all estimating and shop management applications, when saving an estimate, must output the BMS estimate transactions to a lo-