However, what the industries did to make EDI happen was WORK TOGETHER. The key to really taking CRM, ILM, DMS and so on in the alphabet soup is to get the OEM’s, dealers and vendors together and agree on a standard. Once that happens, you can take OEM Financial Services customers and seamlessly pass them to any CRM vendor when they come due, trigger a specific customer class, do the right follow up without duplicating it to an existing process in the dealer’s own CRM work plan. You can more accurately pull histories, sales activity across all departments… the potential is huge and the tech is already there. Most vendors would just have to plug into the process by building their own translator to the EDI standard.

But I’m sure folks already have this idea somewhere. Microsoft .net is a concept that may be able to break the standards barrier or a collaboration between vendors, OEM’s and dealers may make it happen. What I’ve seen though is that there is a strong sense of territorialism in some respects (ADP’s data agreements come to mind), which would complicate making an EDI standard work, because one company wants to be tight-fisted and force clients and potential product partners alike to spend bigger bucks than they can afford to participate.

The insurance and healthcare EDI initiatives worked because everyone saw a common good for it, especially since a customer could travel from one provider to another and still need access to all their information.

Just my two cents. If the industry was willing to work together more, EDI and a standard could get done all too quickly, and allow a fairer playing field for all the vendors to compete in.

Thanks for reading.

ALSO — Shawn Morse/Alex — I work for a group with multiple franchises — and just switched from a system that was customer-centric — everyone in the same bucket (sure miss it!). The technology and the system has been around for a couple years — I will respect Jeff’s and Alex’s wishes to not make this a commercial.