A collaborative engineering environment (CEE) enables the effective capture, management, communication, and exploitation of all product related information to a project team. The systematic employment of this information offers substantial improvements in productivity, cost savings, cycle time reductions, product integrity, and lifetime supportability of the system. Advanced CEE capabilities exploit and leverage the engineering, architectural and technological expertise of enterprise subject matter experts (domain experts) across multiple complex systems development and integration activities. The CEE provides a tightly coupled process automation using reusable product elements for coupling information with engineering processes and ensuring adherence to repeatable and traceable engineering processes. A product catalog provides a single information management point for intrinsic complex product characteristics and facilitates the propagation of that information to engineering teams incorporating the complex product into their system designs. The intrinsic complex product characteristics are augmented with implementation specific information to fully describe the complex product in the system design.