Manufacturers face many obstacles across the life cycle of delivering a product to market.

They often find themselves:
• Spending a lot of time reworking or repairing parts
• With parts that fail inspection, but fit and function properly when assembled
• With parts that pass inspection, but do not fit with other parts and assemblies
• Disagreeing with vendors about whether parts are made dimensionally correct
• With different understandings about design intent—in regards to form, fit, and function—by various groups within their organizations
• Dealing with team members who are intimidated when they see GD&T symbols on drawings
• With high manufacturing costs due to tight tolerances on noncritical features

Many of these problems are the result of an unclear definition of product and process requirements and an under-utilization of existing measurement data.

The case has never been greater for manufacturers to have a well-defined dimensional engineering (DE) process that enables the collection and analysis of relevant, meaningful variation measurements at every stage, from design through production.

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