At the IAM convention, IAM presented ISO 17451-1:2016 ISO as the Standard for the numeric coding of inventories

IAM has spent 13 years developing an ISO Standard for the numeric coding of inventories.  The Standard, ISO 17451-1:2016, if used throughout the moving industry worldwide, will allow data to be collected and manipulated much more easily, will help protect customers’ data and help insurance companies to manage and, if necessary, fight spurious insurance claims.

The concept was presented at IAM in Washington, DC by Brian Limperopulos, IAM Vice President; Erik Pettersson and Taavi Suorsa from Scan2Move; and Boris Populoh from Willis Relocation Risk Group.  Brian said that Scan2Move is the only software company that adopted the ISO Standard from the start and he encourages all moving companies to press their software suppliers to do the same.

The session was about the future of moving.  Brian said that technology is often discussed however, without common standards around the world it was impossible to make the best use of new technology. “If the new Standard was adopted on an industry-wide basis, it would have a huge impact on our day-to-day business,” he said.

Erika and Taavi presented the concept to highlight the benefits of a common format for digital inventories.  They explained that recording inventories digitally eliminated human error, prevented mistakes owing to bad writing, language difficulties or smudging.  The information could easily be shared between customers, assignees, movers, agents, customs, shipping lines, RMCs, auditors and insurance companies, avoiding confusion and making the whole process faster and much more accurate. It was also possible to track individual items so that, if they were missing, it would be possible to identify at what point they were lost.

From the insurance point of view, Boris Populoh said that around 20% of claims were paid because they could not be fought owing to missing or illegible information. His company had already developed a system that used the new Standards to streamline the process, however it would be necessary for all software providers to work to the Standard for it to be fully effective.  “The ISO standard is nothing more than a simple mechanism to translate all of the different codes, for all of the different systems, into a standard, understandable language,” he said.

Brian said that we will not get the technological future we expect until this Standard is adopted. He said it was not necessary for movers to do anything other than challenge their software suppliers to map their existing systems to the new Standard. He asked all companies to speak to their suppliers and encourage them to work to ISO 17451-1:2016 and, in doing so, help to smooth the entire data collection and management process for the entire industry worldwide. Companies are often reluctant to change however, when enough of their customers demand it, they have no choice.

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