Imagine driving a car in a city without standard road widths or margins, without standard traffic separators, signals or signage?
That’s currently the state of automotive retail industry, where technology vendors, manufacturers and, most importantly, dealers are operating without a common and consistent set of data standards.
A panel representing dealers, OEMs and technology vendors serving the auto retail industry took to the NADA Show Live Stage on Friday to discuss the need for a set of standards to securely and efficiently integrate data flows across all channels of the automotive ecosystem and to support Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail (STAR), an industry group with the goal of agreeing on non-proprietary technology standards across the industry.
The panelists talked about all the drawbacks associated with not having a single set of standards, including significant costs to vendors who have to adapt and translate data rather than work on innovation, overall data quality issues associated with difficultly in securely transferring data, and, for dealers, the lack of ability to choose the software they want without worrying if it can be integrated.
“We’re in the business of selling cars and supporting dealers,” said Manish Mehrotra, Executive Director of Digital Business Planning and Connected Ops at Hyundai Motor North America. “If we have to integrate with multiple vendors without standards, it’s difficult to do that beyond the four-to-five partners that a dealer typically has. From a data transfer experience, it becomes fragmented.”
“As a vendor, we are dealing with so many partners that need to integrate, but have no common standard. If you look at auto industry as whole, there are so many providers that dealers depend on,” said Guru Sankararaman, Co-founder, CFO and VP of Operations at Tekion Corp.
“What’s happening is product companies like us, we want to build that frictionless experience, he added. “To do that, a lot of things need to come together behind the scenes. Without standards, it takes a lot of time and effort, and you end up with duplicative efforts. It becomes an impossible journey.”
Check out more of this panel discussion in the video below.
