STAR’s 2009 Release: Bridging the Gaps

McLean, Virginia, May 18, 2009 -- Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail (STAR), a global information technology standards body for retail automotive and related industries, has released its final set of schema repositories for its 2008-2009 publication cycle.

With this release STAR continues to prove that while it may be “Automotive” in name, STAR is more than capable of supporting related industries such as the medium and heavy-duty truck sector. In fact, a significant portion of the enhancements in this release can be attributed to requests made by STAR’s Truck segment. These requirements focused heavily in the area of Parts Management with updates to the Parts Inventory, Parts Prices List, and Parts Shipment specifications among others. This level of cross-industry harmonization is made possible through STAR’s use of a semantically flexible vocabulary creating functional equivalents that meet the needs of multiple industries.

In addition to proving itself as a cross-industry standard, STAR continued to strengthen its position as a globally-recognized standards solution in a project with European auto manufacturers, Renault SAS and PSA Peugeot Citroën. The manufacturers worked together with STAR to identify and incorporate needed enhancements into the STAR Sales Lead standard to meet international requirements. These enhancements have since been found to meet the needs of various U.S.-based users.

The ability of the STAR organization to develop open standards that bridge the gap between industries as well as regions is a testament to its commitment to the efficient and interoperable exchange of business communications.

STAR is technology dedicated to business efficiency.

About STAR

The Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail (STAR) organization is the information technology (IT) standards organization for retail automotive and related industries. STAR is leading the effort to implement voluntary IT standards throughout the automotive industry. These standards are designed to support business information needs and provide secure and reliable means for dealers, manufacturers, and retail system providers to communicate. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, STAR is a not-for-profit volunteer organization and its members include dealers, manufacturers and retail system providers. As members, these companies are interested in developing, promoting, and administering voluntary IT standards in the retail automotive industry and improving the effectiveness, timeliness and competitiveness of the IT solutions needed within the retail automotive industry.

For more information about STAR and a list of current members please visit www.starstandard.org.

For further information, contact Ghezal Khalili at 703-556-8584.