Companies in today's competitive manufacturing environment continually strive for an edge over the competition. One way for companies to achieve this is to more efficiently and effectively deliver engineering design data to the broad set of users requiring access to this information. While over the years methods used in accomplishing this have changed they have deviated little from the paper based orthographic drawing as the end deliverable.

Though the deliverable has remained basically the same, the process of getting to the orthographic drawing has transitioned significantly: from distributing manually generated paper drawings - to manually generated CAD drawings distributed via paper - to manually generated CAD drawings electronically distributed without paper. In this process transition, companies have realized benefits in developing designs quicker and disseminating the information faster.