Bill of Characteristics: Key to Achieving the Intelligent Technical Data Package

As the industry moves toward implementing a true Model Based Enterprise founded on consistent interpretation and reuse of the annotated product model, the needs of lifecycle users of the model at all levels of the supply chain must be addressed.  The primary issue is how to effectively reuse the data contained within the product model throughout an extended supply chain.  This model and associated information such as specifications and notes comprise the complete technical data package (TDP).  At the core of the TDP are the characteristics that define the product. 

While these characteristics are currently being utilized both internally and externally across the extended enterprise, it is being done by manually re-creating the data, which consists of TDP consumers repeating the steps of analyzing the TDP to identify characteristics.  The challenge is to find a way to digitally extract the characteristics in a format that they can then be imported into the downstream applications.