Situations · Data protection
CAD files, specifications and BOMs sent to contract manufacturers accumulate in supplier systems for years and are a common origin of grey-market and lookalike products. Protection means sending production files that require ongoing permission to read, scoped per supplier, so switching manufacturers ends the old one’s ability to open anything.
There is no version of contract manufacturing where the factory does not receive the design. They need the CAD files, the specifications, the bill of materials, the tolerances, the finish notes and the test criteria.
Which produces the uncomfortable identity at the centre of hardware: everything a factory needs to build your product is everything anyone needs to build your product. There is no subset that is sufficient to manufacture and insufficient to copy.
A supplier relationship is not one transfer. It is revision A, then B, then C, then the tooling drawings, then the packaging spec, then the updated tolerance after the first production run.
Over three years that is hundreds of files, spread across their engineering team’s workstations, their quality system, their tooling partner, and whatever they sent to the sub-supplier who makes the enclosure.
Then you move production, for cost or capacity or quality. Your relationship ends. The archive does not.
The assumption is usually that a copycat product begins with someone buying your product and taking it apart. That happens, and it is slow, expensive and imprecise.
The faster route is the one you supplied. A grey-market run on the same line after hours, or a competitor’s product that matches your tolerances a little too exactly, generally traces back to the exact files you sent, still sitting in a supplier’s system.
It is worth being clear-eyed: that supplier is often also quoting for your competitors, using engineers who have your drawings open on their second monitor.
Production files sent under data protection are readable while the relationship is live, scoped to each supplier separately.
Move production and the old supplier’s copies stop opening, across every revision you ever sent. The new supplier gets their own access. A sub-supplier gets only what they need for the part they make.
Their engineers open the files in the tools they already use, on the same schedule. The step you are adding is at setup, once, and it is the only thing you are asking of them.
The forward-looking version matters more than the cleanup. Every design you send from now on has an end date attached to a commercial relationship rather than to nothing.
That changes how freely you can quote. Sending drawings to three factories for a competitive quote is currently a permanent disclosure to two companies that will not win the work.
Production files are readable while the relationship lives, per supplier. Change manufacturers, and the old one’s copies stop opening. Your next product’s drawings never join a permanent archive you do not control.
access ended
Data protection. Start where the problem actually is.