Vehicle and component manufacturing companies in the European automotive industry and their suppliers of Non-Production Material (NPM) have many productivity gains to achieve in making information about these products available on-line and facilitating their on-line ordering.

Putting this information on-line requires the sharing of product databases and the availability of electronic catalogues at both the customer and supplier side.

This situation is particularly applicable to those NPM which are required for MRO (Maintenance, Repair and Operations) i.e. those products which support the industrial operation of the manufacturing sites but which do not form part of the finished product.

These include industrial equipment and supplies, pneumatic, hydraulic, mechanical, electrical, chemical products etc.

Making product databases and catalogues available on-line acts as a reference for the commercialization of the products and makes the distribution and update of the product information much more efficient.

Today, an “interchangeable” part is coded and described in many different ways, according to which company is making, selling or using the part. This causes inefficiencies for the user which in some cases may be quite significant.

The product information related to the “identification” of NPM covers several domains:

• structured characterization of the products,
• organization of the products in a structured classification system,
• unique codification of the products.

A multi-sector NPMI initiative (named PFI – Produits de Fonctionnement Industriels), taking into account the above concepts, has been underway in France for some time whilst, in the German industry, the eCl@ss-group, a multi-industry co-operation of global players, has been working in the same field together with ISO/IEC and national standardisation organizations.

The Odette NPMI initiative brought together these different initiatives under the banner of the European automotive industry in order to improve the information exchange between the various actors, e.g. manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, customers, designers, users, …) in the cross-industry supply chain of European automotive companies.

To achieve this goal, the Odette NPMI Working Group resolved to consider only stable and durable solutions based, wherever possible, on international standards.

For this reason the Odette NPMI Recommendation is based on ISO/IEC, CEN and other internationally recognized standards.

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