In the summer of 2009 Odette conducted an extensive survey on the use of portal applications and EDI for data exchange in the automotive industry.

The survey was initiated after a podium discussion at the Odette Conference 2008, where users complained about increasing workload for sending and retrieving data via portals, when EDI systems are in place and could do the job better. We wanted to obtain a more comprehensive view of the situation and identify areas for improvement, so the Odette Technology Committee started the investigation to obtain an overview of the usage and impact of these new technologies.

We received 607 replies to our questionnaire from vehicle manufacturers and suppliers all over Europe, which gave a very representative picture of the industry‘s view. 55% of the answers were provided by people responsible for IT and/or EDI in their companies and 45% were key or other users.
An expert team analysed the feedback carefully and the results of the analysis have formed a detailed report highlighting where there are major gaps, what should be improved, and which are the most preferred ways to communicate. The report has just been published and is available for download from our website .

The main conclusions of the report are:

EDI is perceived as the most favourable and most effective way of data transmission in the automotive supply chain. The majority of companies consider portal applications as less useful, with an average ranking of between medium and low usability.	Portals: Pleasure or Pain? Find out at
There was common agreement that there is room for improvement by adding a better method of automated data exchange to portal applications. In order of priority, the list of suggested areas for this type of feature are: Container management (Returnable Transport Items) Quality data – related to product quality, but also to quality of logistics processes

The results fully justify the retention of the application of EDI (EDIFACT and new technologies) as one of the major focuses of the Odette Technology Committee. However, the link between portal applications and traditional EDI and their parallel implementation has to be strengthened. This could be supported by the facilitation of emerging technologies like web-services.

Is EDI still number 1 for electronic data exchange?

Since the early 1980s, the use of EDI to transfer structured data by agreed message standards without human intervention, in order to streamline and optimise logistics and other processes in the automotive industry, has increased significantly. Different national and international organisations like UN/CEFACT, ANSI, Odette, Galia and the VDA, have defined standards to enable transmission and interpretation of data.

Since the Internet became more and more important in the last decade, many new collaborative processes have been established with new web-based technologies, such as portals, electronic mails or marketplaces. Based on the growth of Web 2.0, the increase of these non-standardised practices has continued. Despite the optimisation of dedicated processes at some companies, the efforts and operating expenses at other companies within the automotive supply chain have increased. This led to a discussion about the effectiveness and benefits of new technologies compared with standardised classic EDI-based communication.

The feedback we received to the questionnaire was much larger than we expected. It indicates that processes of data exchange in the automotive supply chain are still of great concern to all involved. It is also remarkable that EDI – contrary to its reputation as being old-fashioned, complicated and expensive – is the unchallenged No. 1 choice for data exchange.

This does not mean that portal applications or other means of communication are unnecessary and should be replaced. There will always be a need for interactive information exchange between business partners. However, it is clear that as soon as regularly recurring activities are required to retrieve and send data to and from a portal, the advantages are clearly on the side of the portal provider and impose additional work on the portal user. Generally we can presume that a machine to machine communication (automated processing) is preferred by the users as soon as the infrastructure (e.g. an EDI system) is available.

Independently of whether portals or EDI are the appropriate means of communication for a given business process between two business partners, the result of the survey supports the need for further standardisation. This relates to portal content and layout as well as to structured data exchange with EDIFACT or XML.

Two major areas have been highlighted for improvement: packaging management and quality data exchange. Quality may be interpreted here as not only product quality, but also as quality of logistics services, EDI message content etc.
Finally, the result of the survey is also a clear confirmation of the value of the work that has been done within the Odette community: standards are not only needed, but are being used and accepted. We take this result as a vote and mandate to continue these activities in order to achieve higher integration and quality of business processes in the automotive supply chain.

As a result, the Technology Committee will be proposing the following projects:

1. To extend existing portal applications by machine to machine communication – given the acceptance of EDI (as general technology), structured data exchange is to be preferred, either via traditional or new technologies (to be further discussed). Robots / Agents are not the best choice. Portals are not standardised and therefore a new agent for each portal is always necessary.
2. To standardise the content and layout of common portal applications.
3. To support packaging management and quality data exchange with structured data exchange as the business areas of highest interest.
4. To further explore where and how web-services can fit into the existing infrastructure.
5. Try to determine how to integrate smaller suppliers into automated business processes with a minimum of cost (This will be a key part of the EU Supply Chain Project – see separate article for more information).