On the shop floor, the manufacturer decides

Shop records are rich with decisions people made. Records that commonly count:

• Your MES or ERP history of production and inventory
• Supplier quotes and RFQ threads
• Feedback on design for manufacturing
• Nonconformance records and the fixes that followed
• Work instructions and routings

If some programs carry export controls, leave them out completely. You mark them, and they never reach the copy. Any doubtful job is simply left out.

Nobody requests passwords, and the originals remain where they are. Buyers license a prepared copy of approved records, and only after you have checked a sample. Hold back whatever line, process or period you regard as key to what sets you apart.

A lot of shops make parts to customer-owned drawings. You can exclude them customer by customer, and placeholders stand in for each customer's name. Whether any customer material fits your agreements is a question for you and your counsel. We give no legal advice on that question.

Start with the estimate, and on the brief call sort the work into three piles: clearly your own, customer owned, and restricted. The first pile is usually where the scope begins. Your plant keeps running the whole time, because no one needs to touch your systems.

Buyers get the records you approved, prepared as a copy, and nothing more. Think of one corrective action from the defect report through root cause analysis to the lasting solution, every customer, supplier and operator swapped out. Labs want to learn from patterns of this kind across many years of output. Machines, recipes and vendor terms remain where they are, and whatever you consider a trade secret can stay out of scope.