With data providers such as Glass’s, FleetNet and CDL, as well as individual vehicle manufacturers, all having their own vehicle codes, encoding and cross-matching data is a common problem for companies involved in all parts of the industry, from vehicle sales, finance and insurance through to servicing, repairs and parts supply. Not only that, as new vehicles are released into the market each month it is a constantly moving target.

ATD’s Vehicle Matching System (VMS) can cross-match vehicles in bulk to any industry coding standard, and also cross link vehicles from one coding standard to another, quickly and accurately. It can work with vehicle data held in any storage format, and is able to cope with vehicle descriptions of varying quality and accuracy. Its sophisticated data matching algorithms easily handle different terminology, abbreviations, concatenations as well as missing / incomplete data. 

Thousands of vehicles can be matched in minutes. With every suggested match other possible matches are offered and ranked in order, with the user being able to select a match manually and override the system. When matches are saved, VMS learns from decisions made to help with later matching runs.

The result of several man years’ research and investment in data matching techniques and vehicle data characteristics, VMS has already been endorsed by the vehicle valuation specialists Glass’s and vehicle history checking company CDL Vehicle Information Services. 

Peter McCullough, director of data & data partnerships at Glass’s, commented: 'I engaged ATD to assist us in a complete quality assurance review of all the cross-reference data we maintain to match Glass’s vehicle codes to other industry codes.  These include CAP, MVRIS (SMMT) and FleetNet for both cars and LCVs.  VMS was used to provide an automated match of well over a quarter of a million vehicle codes and intelligently highlight any of our existing matches that needed further review.  VMS did an excellent job in helping our data team achieve the delivery of our updated code tables to customers on time and on budget.'

ATD Solutions director Ashley Clark commented: 'VMS actually started life as a core part of our successful vehicle re-valuation and RV re-forecasting system (AVS). Everyone who saw AVS commented on how impressive the vehicle data matching facility was and what a common problem vehicle coding was across the whole automotive industry.  The penny dropped and we developed VMS as a new standalone product but using the existing proven AVS matching routine. We also offer data matching as a service to help customers with a one-off vehicle coding requirement or where there is backlog to overcome before VMS can be taken in-house.'