You decide what the plant shares

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

• Inventory and production history in your ERP or MES
• Supplier quotes and RFQ threads
• Manufacturability feedback on designs
• Corrective actions and nonconformance reports
• Instructions for each job and its routing

Any program under export controls can be left out entirely. Whatever you flag stays out of the copy. When in doubt about a job, the default is to exclude it.

Originals stay in your systems, and no one asks for passwords. Buyers license a prepared copy of approved records, and only after you have checked a sample. Any line, process or time period you consider core to your edge can be held back.

A lot of shops make parts to customer-owned drawings. Those can be excluded customer by customer, and every customer name in the copy is swapped for a placeholder. Whether any customer material fits your agreements is a question for you and your counsel. We do not offer legal advice on it.

Ask for the estimate, then use the short call to sort your work into three piles: clearly yours, customer owned, and restricted. The scope usually starts with the first group. Nothing stops on the floor, as your systems never need to be touched.

A buyer receives a prepared copy of the records you approved, and nothing else. 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 these, repeated over years on the floor, are what AI labs hope to study. Nothing about your equipment, recipes or supplier terms moves, and any trade secret can be kept out of the scope.