In July 2009 the European Commission issued a Call for Tenders for a service contract aimed at the harmonisation of business processes and data exchange architectures and standards, at European or international level, within the automotive sector.
The objective is to facilitate the participation of SMEs in global digital supply chains and, being the leading collaboration platform for the European automotive industry, Odette naturally decided to enter a bid. We were delighted when the Commission recently announced that the consortium headed by Odette International had won the contract.

The partners in the consortium with Odette are:

CLEPA, the European Association of Automotive Suppliers

CECRA, the European Council for Motor Trades and Repairs

Boost, an international consultancy firm specialising in the design and implementation of digital collaboration tools

INOVA+, one of the leading private European consultancy groups in innovation

These partners, together with sub-contractors such as Odette Sweden, GALIA, SupplyOn, TecCom and ecat-npmi, bring a vast amount of experience to the project.

The work will initially involve the analysis of the current situation in terms of eBusiness adoption along the entire value chain of the automotive sector, taking account of existing standardisation work at European and international level, identifying interoperability problems and any further standardisation requirements.

The next task will be to develop an overall collaborative reference architecture of business processes and data exchange models for the sector in order to achieve B2B interoperability at cross-border level throughout the EU.

The feasibility of the reference architecture will be demonstrated by setting up and monitoring sectoral and cross-sectoral cross-border pilots of standardised electronic supply chain communication systems, involving as many firms as possible, notably SMEs, along the value chains.

Finally a workshop will be organised to present and validate the reference architecture and the results of the pilots. This will be followed by promotion and dissemination of the benefits and business opportunities that can be derived from the creation of digital value chains and of the reference architectures and results of the pilots.

The project known as "auto-gration" (automotive integration) started in January 2010 and will last for 24 months. We will keep you informed of progress along the way and if you have any questions or want to know more please contact the Project Manager or consult the auto-gration website.