VDA (the Association of the Automotive Industry) is a lobby which supports the interests of the Automotive Industry in all areas of economics of road-traffic, such as standardisation, quality assurance, traffic policy. The members of the association are German enterprises with industrial manufacturing in the entire area of automobiles. VDA in turn has working parties, which handle the main topics of the Automotive Industry. The function of the working party CAD/CAM is to clarify requirements and to develop methods to transfer engineering data economically, reliably and timesaving within the Automotive Industry. These are published as general recommendations and are applied nationally as well as internationally. The standards include for example ODETTE, ENGDAT, ENGPART.

ODETTE (Organization for Data Exchange by Tele Transmission in Europe) is the protocol to be used predominantly for the exchange of logistical and CAD/CAM data in the Automotive Industry. Already implemented security settings and comfort functions such as restart ability and qualified error handling guarantee the high performance and secured transmission of digital information.

ENGDAT (Engineering Data Message) is a standard especially developed for the exchange of construction data within the Automotive Industry. With the ENGDAT message, which is set up on ODETTE, an electronic delivery note for the transmitted file is generated, which contains additional information about the sender, the receiver and the CAD/CAM file. Many OEMs require the usage of ENGDAT, because with the application of this protocol subsequent processes can be optimized.