Nowadays the organizations want to be flexible and responsive to the market changes and to keep up with technologies, optimizing the time and cost of products life cycle. The product development process has become increasingly dynamic and complex, also requiring the collaboration among business partners. For this reason, companies need to create a robust interoperability between disciplines and departments. Traditional engineering practices, processes, tools and mindset should evolve to use a single definitive data source to ensure accuracy and consistency of data throughout the product lifecycle and to enable rapid and cost-effective distribution of product information from upstream to downstream. In this context, the Model Based Enterprise (MBE) represents a fully integrated and collaborative environment that embraces feedback from the various stages of the product lifecycle improving the model representation. The key component of this approach is the concept of Model-Based Definition (MBD). There are several barriers to the implementation and adoption of model-based approaches within the companies, although this does not limit its adoption at different levels.The concepts of Model Based Enterprise and Model Based Definition are analysed in order to clarify their relationship with the product lifecycle management and to identify existing maturity models. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the maturity of MBE applications. Following a theoretical approach, the Core-MBE framework is developed as an innovative tool for assessing the level of maturity of organizations in a model-based transformation process. Two manufacturing case studies (an aerospace company and a mechanical carpentry SME) were carried out to validate the proposed framework.