Mostly discussed on Dimensioning and Tolerancing lists/forums, there are occasional commenters there that swear they have gone entirely paperless, but few have any details. I suspect the majority are those with fully in-house manufacturing or those with captive external suppliers, like injection molders and their mold makers. In these cases the engineers know what variations they will get based on nominal sizes, and just work with them rather than establishing tolerances and trying to find suppliers.
As far as I know there is no way to output a 14.41 compliant model that can be read by just anyone - PTC to UG to SW to Inventor is not going happening. And with 14.41, no one can subcontract on price/performance alone. The closest I see now is IDA-STEP.
Within PTC software D&T is clumsy to apply and an engineering dead end for analysis. The CE-Tol to Ti-Tol to whatever PTC calls it now only analyzes what the user specifies and only if they buy the module.
What is needed on the engineering end is an integrated tool that complains on uncontrolled surfaces and automatically creates extreme-tolerance distorted models to show what the D&T scheme allows. Even that is problematic as, for example, H35.2 as applied to extrusions would not be a noticable oversight if a simple extrusion was compared to Y14.5. E.g. The thickness of a flange on an extruded angle, controlled by a size dimension has a much greater variability expected per H35.2 than Y14.5, but there is nothing in PTC software to note that difference. Additionally, users are deformation ignorant and will not re-specify flatness on a piece post-machining because 'it is already on the raw stock.' Per 14.5 the thickness value in part limits flatness, but the installation may tolerate even more than that and uneven removal of internal stresses can produce more than that.
This is interesting:
http://www.cax-if.org/vendor_info.php?file_id=4 PTC Support of STEP from "The CAx Implementor Forum (CAx-IF) is a group of software developers and testors working on Computer Aided Design (CAD) translators based on the ISO 10303 -- STandard for the Exchange of Product model data, STEP (visit this ISO site for more information on the STEP standard)."
