Repair Order Committee History and Milestones

In 2007 Mike Hastings of CynCast approached the industry, highlighting the need for a standardized repair order message. At that time, the vehicle damage estimates didn’t have any repair information in them. Mike held a meeting at NACE 2007 and Fred Iantorno of CIECA stepped up to the plate and pledged CIECA support, naming Mike Hastings and Toan Nyguen of ABRA as co-chairs of the committee. In 2008 a “face to face” meeting was held in Scottsdale, Arizona with excellent industry turn out. In attendance were all the major estimating system companies, DuPont, and several notable industry stakeholders. What is important to note is that all the major industry players were there along with senior management, ready to get this project started. In this meeting, the architecture of the Repair Order was identified and laid out. After the meeting, CIECA partners were itching to get started.

The Repair Order officially became standard in 2008, and the first implementation was rolled out in 2008. In 2009 a second implementation was released this one involving the transporting of jpegs in the repair order and was used extensively by Enterprise Rent A Car for their own fleet while undergoing repair. With this integration, when a shop writes an estimate, they upload 20 jpeg images along with the estimate to Cyncast servers through CynCast’s “web claim management system” which then move on to Enterprise using the repair order message that CIECA developed. As a result there are currently tens of thousands of claims with images and Repair Orders move through the Cyncast servers each month. Before the CIECA standard it was all done with strings of e-mails.

Mike Hastings notes that because the repair order standard is written in XML and endorsed by CIECA, it is an easy sell to get implementation whenever the need arises. For example, recently Fix Auto needed a data feed from CCC One’s hosted servers, and they were able to quickly implement that and had it up and running in June of last year.

When asked about the challenges his committee faced, he said the support as so good from the industry that writing the standard was actually the easy part, but developing the implementation guides was more difficult. These implementation best practices guides are difficult to write but the payoff is huge in the long run especially as more and more companies implement the Repair order standard. Stay tuned next Friday when yet another implementation of the Repair order standard is announced.