As a bridge between design and manufacturing, process planning is to generate a sequenced set of instructions to manufacture the specified part. Automatic interpretation of manufacturing information incorporated in the design documentation such as CAD file has been a knotty subject for manufacturing engineers since no current data exchange format for product data provides a perfect interface between heterogeneous systems. The recent neutral data exchange format STEp, standard for the exchange of product model data, includes not only geometry but also technical and managerial information. STEP AP(Application Protocol) 224 is specifically dedicated to the mechanical product definition for process planning using machining features. Given a design information in STEP AP 224 format, process planning can be made without human intervention. This paper describes a method to determine the sequence of machining features by using the machining features and the manufacturing information expressed in STEP AP224.