This paper explores the difficulties faced by a business enterprise that creates and manages manufactured products. All manufacturing enterprises require many different operations that form its supply chain from order to shipment. Depending upon the industry these supply chains and operations can vary significantly, but there are always common core concepts that must be maintained. As a product specification makes it way through the enterprise supply chain the data that is used to describe and manage the manufacturing and distribution of that product must form many different relationships with other data that exists to support the enterprise operations at any particular location and time within the enterprise. These relationships and data are also used to transform the product data into a form that is fit-for-use at that particular location and time. These relationships and transformations vary significantly as the product migrates through the enterprise supply chain from point-of-order to point-of-shipment with many stops along the way. These transformations are often described as “business-rules” which guide the manual manipulation of the data so it can be successfully used within that operation.

Managing existing products within the supply chain have one set of challenges while creating new products bring a different set of challenges that are quite disruptive to the enterprise supply chain. Some of the enterprise operations are disrupted much more than others during this developmental process. These R&D and Engineering efforts appear at right angles to the enterprise supply chain and are generally not visible to the business owners, which often leads to frustration and misunderstandings on the part everyone who is part of the total enterprise.

Understanding these processes and requirements better positions an enterprise to reduce costs, reduce time to market and improve profitability as well as improving communication and understanding. A strategy of using techniques described by the ISA S88.03 standard to define relationships and transformation rules that support the successfully automation of the movement of product data through the enterprise will be shared.