The 2026 MBE & QIF Summit looks to continue advancing the development of open standards that enable the seamless exchange of Model-Based Definitions and manufacturing quality data.

This annual event brings together experts from academia, government, and industry to discuss challenges, share implementation experiences, and highlight lessons learned across design, manufacturing, and quality assurance.  At its core, the Summit emphasizes a Model-Based approach, where a digital 3D model serves as the authoritative source of information throughout the entire product lifecycle.

Register Today!

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Model-Based Characteristics (MBC) and UUIDs are quickly becoming industry standard for ensuring engineering requirements remain intact, persistent, and traceable, from design, through manufacturing, and into inspection. As digital tools continue to evolve, so do the capabilities to create and maintain a digital thread using model-based characteristics. This thread can begin in native CAD, extend through neutral formats like QIF, and carry forward into a visual data package, enabling enterprise consumption and traceability.

Participants will explore how modern CAD tools, QIF, and 3D viewables can extend their digital thread with model-based characteristics, delivering accuracy, consistency, and efficiency across the product lifecycle.

Register Here

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As each day brings new supply chain challenges, Model-Based practices must evolve to meet them. The 2025 MBE & QIF Summit was an opportunity to share best practices amongst companies that have embraced standards along their MBE journey. Hosted by two premier standards-focused organizations, NIST and DMSC, the event offered a forum for forward looking companies to build awareness of MBE success stories from the standards community.

This year, nearly 200 participants gathered at MxD in Chicago to share, learn and study new ways to be more efficient in their digital transformation. Although each MBE implementation may be different, many execution issues can be the same. This event was initiated to encourage dialogue within the MBE community to share success stories and innovative solutions to similar problems. The event offered over 30-speaker sessions, each with different ideas that could be applied to a unique MBE problem.

Keynote speaker Christopher Garrett, from the USAF Lifecycle Management Center, evangelized multiple innovative concepts to solve critical process problems in new product development for weapons systems. The commitment to standards is a key element in the Air Force acquisition priority to revolutionize their processes.

The MBE & QIF Summit has established itself as an essential knowledge source for those companies wanting to learn more about how to bring success and efficiency to their MBE journey. Plans for a 2026 event are already underway – don’t miss it!

Weren’t able to attend the 2025 MBE & QIF Summit? Access the speaker presentations by clicking below!

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DMSC announces this topic will be addressed and explained in a 1-hour technical webinar on Wednesday, March 19 @ 2pm ET.

If your engineering environment today is 2D drawings, this webinar will describe the benefits of automation, characteristic management, and transition to MBD. Real life examples and strategy will be shown.

Register Here

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The 2025 MBE & QIF Summits are returning to Chicago at MxD April 15-17, 2025.

Interested in attending? Contact DMSC’s Mark Thomas to be notified when further details become available. Attendees of the 2024 event will automatically be notified.

The Summits provide a platform for participants to discuss challenges, implementation issues, and lessons learned related to design, manufacturing, quality assurance, and sustainment of products and processes when a Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) approach is used.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Smart Connected Systems Division organizes technical content for the MBE Summit, and the Digital Metrology Standards Consortium (DMSC) organizes technical content for the QIF Summit. The DMSC is a member-funded, non-profit organization focused on developing and supporting interoperability standards and quality data frameworks for digital metrology in manufacturing. The DMSC’s Quality Information Framework (QIF) standard is at the heart of its mission of interoperability and providing traceability of quality data.

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With the acceleration of worldwide QIF adoption and the emergence of more solutions and solution providers, QIF is a strategic digital metrology choice for companies looking to implement Model-Based Enterprise (MBE). Users are increasingly implementing QIF in their organizations, and every day, new QIF implementations are being engineered and deployed, showing that QIF has become a mainstream technology.

Our current thinking is that an in-person QIF event would provide QIF users with a forum to discuss best practices, learn new QIF solutions, understand new features coming with QIF 4.0, and a roundtable to discuss QIF concerns, strategies, and future needs.

The venue for this event is currently being considered, and a mid-April 2024 is the target date.

Your suggestions and comments are requested and appreciated! Please direct them to DMSC Executive Director Mark Thomas via email.

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DMSC members and solution providers:  Capvidia and ITI Global have teamed up to host a one-hour QIF webinar scheduled for Thursday, September 7th at 10am CT.

This no-charge webinar features all new QIF-centric content showing the correct implementation of MBD/MBE by providing necessary steps such as publishing & validating QIF data. The joint presentation will showcase the value of automating with MBD/MBE by reducing errors, introducing cost-savings, and improving product time-to-market. ITI and Capvidia will provide insights into ISO QIF, a neutral CAD format that is highly regarded and adopted by companies preparing for MBE.

In this free, hour-long webinar, we will cover the following:

• What is QIF and how to unlock MBD/MBE?
• How QIF impacts design, manufacturing, inspection and the supply chain.
• How to get started with QIF and MBE initiatives.

All registrants will have an option to view the recording after registering for the webinar.

The ISO QIF format is a robust neutral CAD standard pivotal for driving Model-Based Enterprise (MBE) initiatives. It facilitates the direct use of 3D MBD data downstream, automating tasks in quality control and other applications.

About Capvidia
Capvidia provides True MBD (model-based definition). Model-based definition (MBD) is the practice of having the 3D CAD model become the authoritative information source for a product’s lifecycle. This is done by including semantic product manufacturing information (PMI) within the 3D CAD model that is both human and machine-readable. Innovators in digital manufacturing have seen double-digital productivity gains (up to 20%) with the adoption of model-based workflows. www.capvidia.com.

About ITI, a Wipro company
ITI specializes in conversion, integration, validation and migration solutions for product data and related systems. Our customers recognize the value of having a trusted solution partner that provides more than just software. ITI solves complex product data interoperability problems so that the world’s leading manufacturers can focus on making great products. In 2019 ITI became a wholly owned subsidiary of Wipro Limited, a leading global information technology, consulting, and business process services company. ITI operates within the Wipro Engineering business that provides customers with a platform to innovate and engineer the next generation of products and platforms at scale. www.iti-global.com

Webinar Register – click here

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ISO/TC 184/SC 4 is the ISO committee that governs STEP AP-242.

The official scope of this committee is the standardization of the content, meaning, structure, representation, and quality management of the information required to define an engineered product and its characteristics at any required level of detail at any part of its lifecycle from conception through disposal, together with the interfaces required to deliver and collect the information necessary to support any business or technical process or service related to that engineered product during its lifecycle.

Meeting summary:

• 793 published ISO standards from this committee … impressive
• The Cavalcade day of cross-domain sharing is an important event to support awareness of other standards and efforts in interoperability. The organizations represented are: Airbus, Siemens, OPC Foundation, UMATI
• There was a very popular Digital Twin Roadmap event held for the first time
• STEP AP-242 Edition 4 is working on the following updates
  o Domain model
  o PMI (Product and Manufacturing Information)
  o PDQ (Product Data Quality)
  o EWIS
  o AP Module 442 Integration
  o Composites
  o Hybrid Modeling
  o UUIDs – A very hot topic with discussions of interoperability from engineering to manufacturing to quality (native to CAM to QIF)
• Of particular note to DMSC:
  o ISO 10303-AP 238 (STEP NC) and the QIF Plan need harmonization

Jennifer’s takeaway:

I was also honored to represent the DMSC and discuss how QIF and STEP harmonize together. QIF filled the inspection domain space where ISO 10303 had a gap. Everyone is very friendly, very smart, and open to the opportunities the future holds. I’m looking forward to the October 22-27, 2023 Fall meetings in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Click Here for Jennifer’s presentation on What’s New with QIF … the current state of our Quality Information Framework (QIF 3.0|ISO 23952:2020) standard.

For more information about QIF 3.0, the work currently in progress to move to QIF 4.0, and other ANSI and ISO standards the Digital Metrology Standards Consortium is responsible for maintaining and developing, reach out to DMSC Executive Director, Mark Thomas.

The post Summary from the 85th Plenary for ISO/TC 184/SC 4 appeared first on DMSC.

This new program will focus on developing a formalized QIF and DMSC training program. Expected challenges include technical curriculum development, program Marketing, logistics of student registering/testing, and more – meaning there are plenty of opportunities for input from those who may not be QIF technical experts.

Now that the formation of a Working Group (WG) has been approved by the DMSC Board of Directors, we are pleased to announce the inaugural WG meeting is set for June 27, 2023 at 9am ET.

The meeting will have three key objectives:

• Select a Chair/Vice Chair/Co-Chair
• Develop an outline for a Working Group Charter
• Decide a suitable cadence for future WG meetings

This and future WG meetings will use the Microsoft Teams meeting platform.

Join on your computer, mobile app or room device
Date: June 27, 2023 at 9am ET

Click here to join the meeting
Meeting ID: 211 385 790 094
Passcode: WNaRij
Download Teams | Join on the web
Or call in (audio only)
+1 585-371-5124,,12003299# United States, Rochester
Phone Conference ID: 120 032 99#

We are aware that due to this late notice in the DMSC June 2023 newsletter, not everyone will be able to attend, however this meeting will be recorded and available for future viewing on the DMSC SharePoint drive: Training-Certification WG.

Anyone with this link should have access to this SharePoint folder.

If helping with this major project interests you, and you’re not able attend this meeting, please contact Mark Thomas, DMSC Executive Director by email.

The post DMSC Announces Inaugural Training/Certification Working Group Meeting appeared first on DMSC.

Many participants of the SC meeting had already known Bailey from the early days of DMSC and the development of the Quality Information Framework/QIF and Dimensional Measuring Interface Standard/DMIS standards – going back to the 1980s. Bailey’s guidance and humor made working through the origins of early DMSC and QIF a pleasure.

Being author of the original DMIS standard, Bailey brought his experience as a nuclear physicist to the mission of going from an idea to a bona fide standards organization – what we now know as DMSC. He’s especially proud to know that both standards he helped develop have earned ISO status.

Bailey, now 87, entertained the in-person and on-line SC group with several stories about his tribulations transitioning pieces of the CAM-I organization into DMSC. DMSC became incorporated in 2005, and Bailey continues to serve the DMSC as Executive Director Emeritus.

Update 6/28/23: Sadly, shortly after this article was published, Bailey H. Squier passed over the bar, peacefully and surrounded by friends.

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