As the modular production is an important issue in globalized manufacturing industries, sub modules or parts of the final product are provided by many suppliers. Some part suppliers design their own products for themselves. In some cases, part supplier may provide the same type product to multiple 1-tier companies. Because all suppliers and 1-tier companies can not use the same CAD system in general case, the engineering change in the CAD model of one company could not propagate to related CAD models of other companies directly. Although they use the same CAD system, it is hard to share their CAD model with each other because of company security policy. In this paper, the neutral reference model, which consists of the neutral skeleton model and the external reference model, is proposed to apply a global top-down modeling approach to collaborating companies.