Electronic Specification Interchange

While much of the data involved in product and order definition has been captured in standard electronic structures such as STEP and EDI, material and process specifications are still handled as amorphous paper-based documents. The use of manual, paper-based specifications is an extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming process. Specifications are an integral part of the product definition process and the use of unstructured, textual-based specifications is a major obstacle in achieving an agile manufacturing enterprise. Renaissance Engineering, with the assistance of the Industrial Technology Institute, proposes to define an architecture and a new business model which uses structured electronic specifications to assist in the product configuration and planning process. The proposed solution involves the definition of a meta-specification within the STEP framework and the integration of the structuring effort with the NIST-sponsored National Standards Systems Network (NSSN). The solution will leverage the pseudo-database capabilities of SGML to enable the NSSN to create specifications that can be used both to generate a traditional document and to maintain specifications in the STEP meta-specification structure. Instead of treating the design requirements in the specifications as simple textual narrative, our approach recognizes that specifications are an integral part of product data and product data exchange.