 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The purpose behind CAPS
Innovation
The CAPS technology and its commercial ownership and open governance model is itself of course very innovative, but the CAPS Consortium’s real purpose is to stimulate the industry through standardising claims data availability. This will produce a great deal more innovative applications and new ways of managing the motor accident repair administrative business processes than is available in today’s fragmented bodyshop information environment.
Competition
The CAPS gateway has been designed and priced to offer a claims data utility service for the industry. It is a bit like the gas pipeline network in the UK. You can buy gas now from multiple competitive suppliers but to be able to offer such competitive choice the gas industry had to agree to only have one separate utility operator that owned the distribution pipe work.
CAPS therefore do not offer any business application claims services. It simply is the secure distributor of the claims data between bodyshops, work providers, insurers, application providers and VM’s.
By providing this simple utility CAPS hopes that it will then create a new level playing field for a healthy competitive new business applications marketplace.
Choice
CAPS is an open non proprietary communication capability that uses standard s/w components and makes the data available to all third parties that have been given authorised access to the data by the data owner. Share ownership in the CAPS consortium is available to all UK bodyshop management system vendors. This will offer a commercially neutral bodyshop led initiative whose goal is to provide some essential new infrastructure (pipework) that once adopted can really begin enable the sort of changes that we all know are long overdue.