Covisint Inc., the company that provides business-to-business services to help automotive makers electronically communicate with partners and suppliers, on Thursday launched a new messaging service.
The Covisint Connect data messaging service provides the means for a company to exchange information with partners and suppliers using XML, rather than EDI [electronic data interchange]. Connect also provides an any-to-any translation capability that works with both XML and EDI.
The Connect service was developed—and funded—by a group of major automotive makers and suppliers, including General Motor Company, DaimlerChrysler AG, Johnson Controls Inc., Delphi Corp. and Lear Corp. A number of those companies are part of the Covisint automotive consortium that includes DaimlerChrysler, Ford Motor Co., GM, Renault S.A., Nissan Motor Co. Ltd. and PSA Peugeot Citroen.
The aim of Connect is to create an industry standard that will provide an across-the-board approach to information exchange in the automotive industry, officials said. A key piece to move that initiative forward is the groups establishment of Business Object Documents, or BODs, standard formats for the most commonly-used transaction documents.
Covisint, with the Connect consortium members, developed six BODs that look to represent a large number of the current-data messaging volume, officials said. Those BODs have been submitted to the AIAG [Automotive Industry Action Group] for publication.
The Detroit-based Covisint offers additional services to the automotive industry, including Covisint Communicate that provides supplier portal services, and Covisint Collaborate, a Web hosting and trading partner-management service for implementing Web services.