You decide what the plant shares

The written side of a plant carries a lot of expert judgment. Typical qualifying records:

• Production records and stock history from ERP or MES
• RFQ threads and supplier quotes
• Design for manufacturing feedback
• Nonconformance records and the fixes that followed
• Work instructions alongside routings

Your originals never move, and passwords are never requested. What buyers get is the approved material, prepared as a copy, once you have reviewed a sample. Any line, process or time period you consider core to your edge can be held back.

If certain programs are export controlled, exclude them altogether. You flag them, and they never enter the copy. When in doubt about a job, the default is to exclude it.

A lot of shops make parts to customer-owned drawings. Each customer's drawings can be kept out individually, and all customer names are swapped for placeholders. Whether any customer material fits your agreements is a question for you and your counsel. We give no legal advice on that question.

Ask for the estimate first, then let the short call divide your records into what is yours, what customers own, and what is restricted. Scope tends to start with what is clearly yours. Production carries on the entire time, because no one has to access your systems.

Buyers get the records you approved, prepared as a copy, and nothing more. Think of a corrective action file that walks from the first defect report to the root cause and the lasting fix, with every customer, supplier and operator name replaced. Patterns like these, repeated over years on the floor, are what AI labs hope to study. Machines, recipes and vendor terms remain where they are, and whatever you consider a trade secret can stay out of scope.