Automobile specifications, residual values, service and maintenance schedules are researched by some data suppliers and the data is presented as a licenced data bank. Leasing companies, fleet management companies, insurance companies, banks, automobile repair shops and car dealers licence these data banks for the ongoing operations of their own software solutions for configurations, calculations or TCO analysis.
This software is then tailor-made for the particular data provider and utilises tue particular proprietary data formats. In this way, the vehicles are identified via the data provider´s key in
the database. There is no provision for a standard interface for the exchange of vehicle data.
Not all of the data providers supply all the data parameters for every single vehicle – for example JATO Dynamics only provides vehicle specifications and bf forecasts only provides residual values.
The different areas of application within the data bank result in specialized data bank structures. A data provider for passenger car specifications researches every single sales variant that a vehicle has, including model series, model year, body type, type of motor, transmission and trim line – in Germany these make up some 6000 data sets. As opposed to that, a particular data provider for service and planned maintenance only researches the model series, motor type and transmission – in Germany that comprises less than 1000 data sets. This diversity of data granularity within the data banks imminently results in typical specification assignment problems with respect to service and maintenance schedules. When different companies utilise different data providers, additional frictional losses occur due to the lack of common identification features for assigning a vehicle to the data banks in use. In this way, a fleet manager’s leasing query directed to a leasing company often leads to the manual, and thereby more laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone comparison of various vehicle lists. Each data provider supplements, changes and renews his data inventory
in tact with his cyclic data researches, in accordance with modifications in the manufacturer’s range of vehicles. For this reason, adjustments between the various data provider systems have to be repeated regularly.
e:c:logic’s e:c:mapper automatically allocates the identification features which are provided by differing automobile data providers to one another.