On the shop floor, the manufacturer decides

The written side of manufacturing is rich in judgment. Records that often count:

• Production and inventory history from your ERP or MES
• Supplier pricing threads and RFQs
• Design for manufacturing feedback
• Nonconformance reports and corrective actions
• Work instructions alongside routings

Plenty of shops build to drawings owned by their customers. Each customer's drawings can be kept out individually, and all customer names are swapped for placeholders. Whether customer material belongs under your agreements is for you and counsel to answer. We do not give legal advice about it.

If certain programs are export controlled, exclude them altogether. You flag them, and they never enter the copy. When you are unsure about a job, it is excluded by default.

The originals remain in your systems, and nobody asks for a password. What buyers license is a prepared copy of what you approved, after you have reviewed a sample. You may withhold any production line, process or span of time you see as central to your advantage.

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.

Only approved material reaches a buyer, as a prepared copy with nothing added. Picture a corrective action file running from the initial defect report to its root cause and permanent fix, with names of customers, suppliers and operators removed. Patterns like that, repeated across years of production, are what AI labs want to learn from. Machines, recipes and vendor terms remain where they are, and whatever you consider a trade secret can stay out of scope.