Founded in 1987, Automotive Information Systems (AIS), headquartered in St. Paul, MN, is the nation's largest and most comprehensive source of automotive repair knowledge regarding vehicle parts that break, model lines affected, and how best to make repairs.
The company operates primarily as a technical support service for professional automotive technicians—service-station operators, independent garage owners, and even dealership mechanics. Subscribers to AIS may telephone the company's specialists for immediate assistance whenever stumped by any automotive diagnostic or repair problem.
Thirty-one automotive specialists make up the core staff at AIS. Each is a factory-trained ASE Certified Master Technician with years of professional field experience performing vehicle diagnostics and repairs. Combined, these specialists bring to the company 550 years of automotive repair experience.
Products and Services
AIS markets its information under the brand name IDENTIFIX™. The products and services it offers include ten technical telephone hotlines serving 30,000 enrolled automotive shops; aftermarket technical service bulletins distributed through an automated voice retrieval system; Diagrams On-Line™, containing over 40,000 automotive wiring diagrams distributed through a FAX-back service; consulting services to automotive equipment manufacturers; and consumer services.
On average, AIS fields some 250,000 calls per year, more than 20,000 per month. Since the company's beginning, it has helped technicians perform over one million successful automotive repairs.
Operations
The growing complexity of automobiles has created a niche for information companies like AIS. "Today's vehicles require a technician to have access to over a million pages of manufacturers' technical reference materials," says Jeff Sweet, the company's CEO. "In 1980, you would have needed 19 inches of shelf space for the shop manuals of a single GM model year. Today you'd need eleven feet!"
Out of necessity, most automotive shops rely on repair manuals and CD-ROMs containing information consolidated from the vast amount available. But AIS does not. "We work with the original source documents," Sweet explains. That means over 5,200 factory service manuals totaling some 1.5 million pages—the most complete on-site library of automobile manufacturer's service information in the nation. AIS also thoroughly examines new cars on-site in their own fully-equipped diagnostics garage.
And that's not all. Since even factory service manuals contain inaccuracies (their contents are derived from engineering specifications that often see modification when vehicles are actually manufactured, and those modifications seldom find their way back to the manuals), the AIS team gathers information from the thousands of calls received each month and scrupulously corrects their manuals, filling them with notes.
Microsoft and AIS
The large numbers of calls fielded and computer-collated by AIS, coupled with the company's unique and considerable technical expertise, makes possible sophisticated statistical analysis. That, in turn, enables the company to accurately evaluate the reliability of vehicle models and pinpoint repair problems.
Of the 45 million automobiles sold in the U.S. last year, 34 million of them were previously owned. Through its pairing with AIS, Microsoft can enhance MSN Autos' vision of helping Internet users with all phases of their automotive research and shopping.
