The MSR consortium (Manufacturer Supplier Relationship) is an initiative of the top managers of development (E-Leiter) of the German car makers. It is run as task 11 within strategy circle 4 (electric/electronical development).
The mission is the development of cost reduction potentials by cooperation in non competitive areas and the use of synergy potentials in a common projects.
MSR supports the joint development of car manufacturers and their electric/electronic component and system suppliers by enabling process synchronization and proper information exchange.
MSR/MEDOC is a subtask of the MSR consortium. MEDOC is an acronym for MSR Engineering Data Objects and Contents.
MEDOC develops methods standards and implementation for information exchange in the engineering process.
MSR/MEDOC enables everybody - regardless of their tools and data management environment - to exchange information and work products online. Team members can retrieve, process and add information at any time and any location. MSR/MEDOC provides enabling technologies by applying internet standards such as XML in the distributed engineering process.
The main objectives of MSR/MEDOC are:
 
Seamless, continuous and consistently structured product documentation for electric/electronic components and systems across the entire life cycle e.g. for requirement specification
 
Support of views appearing within the development cycle
 
integration of heterogeneous IT environments Product Data Management / Technical Data Management
In order to achieve the intended objectives, MSR/MEDOC used the following approach:
 
Analysis of the entire E/E-system and identification of technical and application domains on the level of components and systems
 
Building information models for the identified domains and applying appropriate implementation technology
 
Verification of the results within selected car component series development projects
Results of MSR/MEDOC are the defined structures, modelled as XML-DTDs (eXtensible Markup Language - Document Type Definitions):

Developed Structure
Covered Domain
MSRSYS
Electrical hardware systems and components
MSRSW
Software for electronic control systems
MSRREP
General documentation and change management
MSRFMEA
Failure Mode and Effect analysis
MSRDIA
Diagnostic documentation and specification
MSRNET
Network systems
MSRDCI
Document Control Instance contains rules for formal content check XML-instances
MSRCC
Container catalog for exchanging Datasets - and files for code, configuration metadata and documentation

The developed structures are supported by additional products:
 
Sample Implementation
 
Documentation comprising of overview, structural principles, reference material user guide
 
Auxillary structures to support particular implementations (MSRDCI)