It is intended for use by the manufacturing community to enable the production of design-based measurement programs of known reliability for CMMs and other point-sample dimensional measurement devices. This tool begins with a CAD design for the part to be manufactured including (and providing introduction of if they are not part available from the design) GD&T specifications, along with information on the capabilities and performance of all components of the measuring system, some of which may be incompletely specified.

It produces as output inspection program code in DMIS 3.0 format and performs measuring system simulations leading to task-specific uncertainty estimates for the GD&T parameters derived from the measurements, in a manner compliant with ANSI/NCSL Z540-2 1997. In addition, it provides a capability to strongly associate with the CAD geometry GD&T parameters and other critical nonshape information about the design and will perform checking adequate to ensure that the tolerancing specification for the design is complete and unambiguous.
The need for a commercial product that embodies these functions is based on the following facts.

The current draft of ISO 17025 requires task-specific uncertainty estimates as a condition of traceability, and ISO 14253-1 gives economic value to reliable uncertainty estimates by requiring that they be applied as modifiers to the product specification when making conformity judgments. In addition to these legal requirements, a commercial product to fulfill these functions has value to manufacturers as a tool to address issues of resource allocation and acquisition. In a completely different arena, the simulation aspect of the product would make it useful as a training device for measurement equipment programmers and operators.