US leadership in aerospace and defense is driven by the ability to produce complex materials, components and systems with unrivaled performance and uncompromising quality. The measure of success in the delivery of these complex engineered products is how well the design intent is transformed into hardware. Traditionally, the flow of requirements has been through large volumes of paper or — more recently — through large electronic files that simply replicate the paper documents often resulting in misinterpretation of design intent and impacting the integrity of the finished product.

e-LINCS (Electronic Industry-wide Network for Characteristics & Specifications) marks a break with this manual-based tradition. A fully electronic, web-based service, e-LINCS allows aerospace and defense suppliers to extract the relevant portions of design intent at the characteristic level, translate that information into hardware, and flow the results back to the prime level. Using e-LINCS, suppliers will greatly reduce cycle times, enhance productivity, and substantially improve product quality.