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Letter to the Editor

SCRS Petitions Information Providers to Provide Industry with BMS Extract

The Estimating Management System (EMS) standard was developed by the Collision Industry Electronic Commerce Association (CIECA) to transfer an estimate from the estimating system to the body shop management system. This process transfers all the information contained on an estimate, and is used by repairers on a daily basis. The EMS standard, while still fulfilling its intended purpose, is outdated and turn-of-the-century technology from both a design and content perspective.

Over the years, the EMS file has been used for purposes other than its original intent. For example, it has been used to report the repair status of a vehicle. Using the EMS in this manner results in all the estimate information being transferred (in addition to the repair status information). As a result, repairers incur the risk of violating state and/or federal privacy laws. Moreover, there have been instances where the repairer's as well as the vehicle owner's information is being sold to other companies, unbeknownst to the repair facility.

Today, there is a replacement for the EMS called the Business Message Specification (BMS). The BMS is built on new specifications that are scalable and technology neutral. Rather than sending the entire EMS file and all the estimate data, the BMS provides repairers with the flexibility and security to transmit specific subsets of estimate information.

Unfortunately, the BMS is not available to collision repairers. Implementing the BMS for repairers will address many of the privacy and data security risks. It will also assist in reducing other manual processes (such as the manual keying of a vehicle's repair status into multiple systems) that we are faced with today.

If you are in favor of moving to the new BMS standard, which would assist repairers in protecting their data as well as their customers, please contact SCRS to have your name added to the petition. SCRS will send the petition to all three information providers requesting they provide the collision repair industry with the BMS format. You can contact SCRS Executive Director Dan Risley at danrisley@scrs.com or his office at 708.598.3384. We will need your name as well as your company's for validation purposes.

Through its direct members and 36 affiliate associations, SCRS is comprised of 6,000 collision repair businesses and 58,500 specialized professionals who work with consumers and insurance companies to repair collision-damaged vehicles.

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