STAR Announces An Exciting New Member Benefit

MCLEAN, Va., Jan. 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- The automotive organization, Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail (STAR) in conjunction with STAR member Motive Retail announced that a powerful new XML tool, XDesign™ is now available as a free benefit to all current STAR members.

Since its inception, STAR has provided members with regularly updated versions of the STAR BODs as part of their membership. These schemas allow different automotive entities to be able to easily exchange and utilize data critical to running all areas of business. Due to the varied business and technical requirements of the many STAR members, these BODs can be very large and cumbersome to work with. Motive Retail has developed a tool specifically for working with large, complex BODs that greatly simplifies and accelerates the process of defining these BODs and then producing an HTML document suitable for specification development. What used to take hours can now be done in minutes.

STAR's primary objective for offering XDesign™ to its members was to increase the value of STAR standards and to drive greater adoption of these standards on a global basis.

In order to achieve these goals, the STAR Steering Committee sought to:

• Simplify the implementation of STAR standards
• Develop tools to assist design and documentation of a STAR-based member implementations
• Reduce the complexity of STAR BODs for each implementation

STAR Chairman, Dwayne Terrier, stated " We see Xdesign™ as the first step in our drive to increase STAR membership and to assist STAR members in keeping up with the automotive industry's rapidly changing digital landscape."

STAR member Motive Retail offered the use of its XDesign™ platform as a means of simplifying the STAR BOD process. XDesign™ is available as a web based platform and can be accessed via:StarMemberServices.com. Members can receive login credentials by contacting Paco Escobar at the contact information at the bottom of this release.

XDesign™ features a simple, intuitive UI that allows rapid:

• Definition of the technical requirements
• Definition of the business requirements
• Generation of unique data specifications

The STAR steering committee has announced that the addition of Xdesign™ is the first of several initiatives aimed at increasing STAR membership and has plans to offer more benefits in 2016.

About STAR:Incorporated in 2001, STAR is a nonprofit, dues-paying organization whose members include dealers, manufacturers, retail system providers, and automotive-related industry organizations. STAR is considered the IT standards organization for the retail automotive industry.

STAR's objectives are to define the open, standard XML message formats for dealer-to-OEM communications (e.g, Parts Orders, Sales Leads, and Credit Applications), to define an open, standard architecture to support the delivery of messages between dealers and OEMs, and to standardize the dealership IT infrastructure.  

About Motive Retail: Motive Retail provides innovative and dynamic system integration solutions to global manufacturers, dealer systems and value added software providers. They provide a solution to the previously intractable problem of how to efficiently integrate with all dealer systems. Motive Retail's integration automation platform gives their  customers the fastest ability to integrate "any system, anytime, anywhere" with minimal IT involvement.

STAR members can gain access to XDesign™ by contacting the program administrator at the information below.

Contact:
Paco Escobar
STAR
518-727-4978
Email 

SOURCE Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail