An important goal of the STAR (Standards for Technology in Automotive Retail) infrastructure project is providing recommendations about the business-to-business communication requirements within the up-stream supply chain in the automotive industry. These recommendations are intended to reduce maintenance and integration costs for supporting dealerships. This document identifies common requirements and measures dealers can take to ensure an effective information technology infrastructure.

The STAR organization is comprised of several Work Groups (WG) that address specific points of interest to the automotive retail IT industry. Most of the work groups are chartered with developing or maintaining the XML Business Object Documents(BOD) or the DTS data formats, but the architecture WG is chartered with finding common architecture and interoperability among STAR members. The architecture WG produces several guidelines: