The Chemical Industry Data Exchange (CIDX) standards organization has recently announced a new direction for the development and maintenance of chemical industry standards. After a long and successful tenure as the harbinger of e Business and related standards, CIDX has decided that the future of standards lies in development of cross industry, rather than industry specific eBusiness standards.
Driven by its member organizations who have realized that eBusiness standards should be cross industry, CIDX took a careful look at a number of different standards organizations, both in terms of soundness of their operations as well as their commitment to proven cross-industry standards development and open standards based methodologies. After lengthy review and analysis, CIDX determined that the best approach to meet member requirements was to transfer its standards setting and maintenance operations to the Open Applications Group (OAGi). OAGi was a natural fit given its major constituents in the automotive and discrete and process manufacturing industries, as well as its ongoing alignment efforts with other standards setting organizations and its use of the UN/CEFACT core components technical specification (CCTS) open standards based common methodologies.
On 1 January 2009 a new OAGi Chemical Industry Council will be stood up to assume CIDX operational responsibilities - to include the current and future versions of the CIDX Chem eStandards®. This new council will consist of at least five former CIDX member companies - but is also open to participation from any other interested parties. The new council will be responsible for setting the direction of chemical industry future standards efforts, to include a new version of Chem eStandards® that is part of the next generation OAGi standards which will be fully conformant with the UN/CEFACT CCTS standards stack.
In addition to the transfer of eBusiness operations to OAGi, those aspects of CIDX that were not directly related to eBusiness standards - such as governance responsibility - are being transferred to the American Chemistry Council (ACC) Chemical Information Technology Center (ChemITC). The ChemITC has three strategic programs already in existence, including a CIO roundtable. With the transfer of CIDX, the ChemITC will form an eBusiness program that will coordinate the work within the OAGi chemical industry council.
SAP has long supported CIDX and the chemical industry, as well as OAGi and its work in developing cross industry standards using the SAP supported UN/CEFACT common methodologies. SAP is working with other standards organizations to identify opportunities for similar convergence and common methodology alignment opportunities.
