E-traceability for ISO STEP CAD/CAM/CNC supply chains

Manufacturing processes traceability has become increasingly important in many industrial sectors, as the way for tracking and tracing manufacturing data at different points in the production history. With the increasing level of collaboration and integration of supply chain in extended enterprises, traceability focus has changed from internal systems to external or chain traceability systems. Moreover, in dynamic and flexible manufacturing environments the objective is also to ensure traceability data exchange between partners heterogeneous systems, and to assure traceability data availability and understandability along the whole product life cycle. The paper addresses this traceability view taking advantage of already available standard technologies in advanced manufacturing environments such as STEP it is particularized to future CNC supply chains by defining traceability capabilities to the new STEP-NC standard.