As part of its efforts to “Move the Industry Forward,” the Collision Industry Electronic Commerce Association (CIECA) hosted a Top-2-Top MSO Summit, which the association said was “the first of many meetings to create a higher-level platform for the industry.”
The summit included presidents and chief information and technology officers who represent approximately 80 percent of the MSO-categorized operations in the United States, according to CIECA.
“This is a great start to a business discussion regarding business solutions, versus talking about bits, bytes, baud and code,” said Paul Gange, president and chief operating officer of Fix-Auto USA.
Janet DeBerardinis, chief information officer of Caliber Collision, added: “There needs to be a ‘reskinning of CIECA’ to create a non-technology image, recognizing that CIECA provides much more – they provide business benefits.”
The CIECA Top-2-Top MSO Summit is the continuing work of the CIECA Marketing Committee, led by committee chair Chad Sulkala of Allstate.
“Dialogue at the senior level of leadership among the major facility operators is critical as the MSOs’ industry segment is requiring streamlined automation of processes among their internal, external systems and with their trading partners,” Sulkala said. “Focusing CIECA purpose and message to the C-Suite level accelerates the individual company benefit and overall efficiency value of CIECA to the industry as a whole.”
CIECA Executive Director Fred Iantorno outlined three overall tasks for attendees over the next 18 months:
- Continue to build BMS solutions to deliver operational efficiencies for all stakeholders across the industry.
- Create a process to certify, document and seamlessly integrate across multiple systems the proper repairs were completed on a repaired vehicle in an ever-increasing and highly complex vehicle substrate construction.
- Further the integration of highly secure CIECA BMS standards among communication partners in information exchange to protect customers and businesses in the world of data breaches and cyber warfare.
“This was the first step of continued conversation with this growing industry segment,” said Iantorno. “We view it as a tremendous success. CIECA will continue to meet with these industry leaders and will take these insights from top thought leaders to our strategic planning meetings in April to incorporate into our overall strategy.”
For more information on CIECA, how to join and its standards, visit the CIECA website or email Iantorno at [email protected].
