Why ACES and PIES Matter

If you are in the automotive aftermarket industry it is likely you are already familiar with ACES PIES and how important it is to have a strategy for maintaining and ingesting these files if you are a retailer or creating these files if you are a manufacturer. If you are a newer retailer or distributor and you’ve not yet had used or heard about ACES and PIES it is critical for your business to get up to speed on these industry standards and how they can, if used correctly, simplify your time to getting auto parts and product data onto your website.

In the past, we’ve seen customers trying to handle these files in Microsoft Excel, but using Excel is risky and leads to human error. The Auto Care Association created these formats years ago in order to make it easier for businesses to exchange fitment data and general parts data. In this post we are going to break down why ACES and PIES matter and why if you have an ecommerce site or a manufacturer these data formats matter and were built to make it easier for companies to quickly and easy exchange information.

The ACES standard

 By far our biggest information inquiry request comes around the ACES standard. Often we will get inquiries from manufacturers asking for more information regarding ACES because a business in their supply chain network has requested they send fitment data in ACES format to them. ACES stands for Aftermarket Catalog Exchange Standard and is the standard built to support fitment for aftermarket parts. This file format is going to include data like year, make, model, submodel, etc – essentially everything needed to verify the automotive parts a customer wants to buy will fit their vehicle. ACES files are sent in an XML format created by brand in order to keep a uniform standard by brand and company.

As mentioned above, this standard was created by The Auto Care Association many years ago. The standard changes somewhat regularly adding additional fields and vehicle information as newer automobiles and features are created. To ensure vehicles are named uniformly across brands, The Auto Care Association also maintains the vehicle configuration database or VCdb for short. This database is updated monthly to include new vehicles. An important way to think about this is, ACES ties a specific part number to a vehicle within the VCdb. There a few other databases that tie back to ACES as well. Another you may hear about frequently is the Product classification database or PCdb. This database creates a standard for businesses to use for part types and part categories. When you are generating ACES it is critical to make sure you complete data validation against these databases so retailers and distributors are able to easily sell your parts!

Now that you know more about what this standard means let’s talk about how to use it. As mentioned before, this standard drives vehicle fitment. If you are selling automotive parts online in some type of marketplace, be it an ecommerce site, Amazon, eBay, Walmart, or otherwise you are going to need to use ACES data to quickly and easily ensure fitment. Strabo’s industry leading PIM, Product Desk can help you push fitment information to all of these sources. If you are running an ecommerce site, we have extensive experience creating year, make, model lookups making it easy for your customers to find the parts they are looking for quickly and efficiently!

The PIES Standard

 PIES, or product information exchange standard, is the standard built to handle all the product data for a given automotive part or accessory. Fitment is critical for a business to ensure they are selling the right part for the right vehicle, but the PIES data standard is just as important! Ensuring you have the proper parts information is critical to providing a stellar customer experience. Much like ACES, “PIES files” are XML files by brand with all of the product information in them. The PIES XML includes a number of important pieces of product information like the brand id for the part and all pertinent pricing information. In today’s world where supply chain constraints continue to affect pricing, keeping these PIES files up to date is critical!

While PIES does not technically require any database from The Auto Care Association, there are a few that link PIES to certain database. One of the databases we see most often used in conjunction with PIES is the product attribute database or PAdb. As you’d expect, these link product attributes in PIES to a standard created by PAdb to ensure easy readability. It is important to note, both ACES and PIES are specifically for the automotive aftermarket and not for OEM replacement parts. Many Strabo ecommerce customer use their PIES data to publish market copy, application data, and more quickly and easily to their web storefronts using our PIM, ProductDesk.

How do you manage all of this?!

Now that you hopefully better understand how ACES and PIES works you might be saying to yourself, “this is all great information, but how I do use all of this?!” Strabo has built and industry leading PIM tool, Product Desk, to use as a central location for both retailers and manufacturers to handle their product information, including digital assets. If you are a manufacturer, Product Desk will help you quickly and easily, export your data in the proper formats to ensure your customers have the latest, up to date ACES and PIES data they need to sell! If you are a retailer, Product Desk is able to take this data into our system and act as a single source of truth to push data to your website, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and more!