Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman have partnered to deploy persistent identifiers (PIDs) across the aerospace and defense supply chain, pulling a dozen metrology and manufacturing software vendors into an effort to give every system in the digital thread a common reference for part features.
A PID assigns a unique, unchangeable tag to an individual feature, a hole, an edge, a surface, or a critical characteristic, and that tag stays with the feature through design, machining, inspection, and sustainment. Lockheed describes the identifiers as the "invisible glue" binding the supply chain into a single searchable data fabric. In practice, a PID lets an inspection result attach to the exact feature it measured rather than to a spreadsheet cell or a disconnected report.
The vendor list covers most of the toolchain a defense part passes through: Sandvik, Seco Tools, Mastercam, Verisurf, Metrologic, Hexagon, Renishaw, InnovMetric, PTC, Siemens, Mazak, and Datanomix. The stated goal is that each tool can publish and consume the same identifier, closing gaps between CAD, CAM, CNC, inspection, and sustainment systems that previously could not share feature-level data.
What the announcement leaves unstated is the standard underneath it. The identifier scheme aligns with the Digital Metrology Standards Consortium's Model-Based Characteristics v1.0, which ANSI approved as an American National Standard in June. MBC 1.0, subtitled "Persistent Identification and Related Digital Practices," pairs a locally unique human-readable tag with a machine-readable UUID for each characteristic and is written to extend the existing Quality Information Framework. Engineers who already run QIF workflows will recognize the PID as QIF's persistent identifier under a program name.
Lockheed frames the payoff as less scrap, rework, and cycle time, since defect data tied to a specific feature can feed back into design for manufacturability. For suppliers, the open question is tooling. Participating means running software that can receive a STEP AP242 or QIF file carrying the identifiers, inspect against the model, and export results as QIF while preserving those tags rather than regenerating them along the way.
