The Automotive Aftermarket Industry Association (AAIA) has published version 6.0 of its Product Information Exchange Standard (PIES) version 6.0. PIES, which includes commercial vehicle product information,
is available for download from the AAIA web site at www.aftermarket.org.
PIES is the industry best practice for the management and exchange of product attribute information. PIES compliance has been getting a lot of attention recently as retailers and wholesalers become fully aware of the advantages of becoming synchronized with the full, rich, standards-based data available from their suppliers.
PIES version 6.0 represents a significant advance for the standard because the documentation has been expanded with a dictionary of data field definitions and the most commonly used code values are included in the specification. In addition, constraints have been added to the XML portion of the standard that ensures that only valid values are allowed in critical data fields.
At the same time as the release of PIES 6.0, AAIA announced a new Web portal for the Aftermarket Brand Code table, powered by Pricedex Software.
The Brand Code table that Pricedex has enabled will make it much easier for companies to identify the brand codes they need while making it faster for AAIA to respond to new code requests.
The latest version of PIES and access to the Brand Code table are available by visiting the "Standards & Technology" page at www.aftermarket.org.