My customer bought company with capability to produce our parts.

[Slim Pickins]

I produce many parts for a tier 1 automotive supplier that are of their design. This is a large percentage of my business. Another company (Supplier B) also sells comparable parts to this same customer albeit with a slightly different Niche. My parts are smaller and their parts are larger, but fundamentally they are produced using the same exact manufacturing process. Because of this size difference, we don’t really compete. My tier one customer has just purchased the other company! While their product is different than ours (larger), they basically have the capability to produce our product also, should they desire. I now have a new SQE that wants “EVERYTHING” with regards to APQP. Process Flow Charts, FMEA, MSA, SPC, Capability studies, Control Plans, Work Instructions, etc. Basically, they are requesting the details of our methodology to produce the parts, without saying that. We want very badly to continue our relationship and don’t truly think they are planning to take the parts as they have signed a new 5 year agreement. But in reality that is only a piece of paper that fundamentally guarantees them a maximum price if they can’t make them cheaper should they desire to.

I am not sure how to move forward. How far can I go with “That is proprietary information?” Or am I screwed?

 

[Golfman25]

Hard no on giving them that information given the circumstances. You may want to sit down with the powers that be and find out their intentions. Maybe they can buy you as well.

 

[Rich S.]

They may be just setting up a dual source, in the event something happens with your company. I would probably give them the bare minimum documents they request. If you have been doing this a long time, you probably have a lot of "tribal knowledge" that makes you successful at it, keep that to yourself

 

[Ron Rompen]

To maintain the 'good working relationship' that you currently have with your customer, you are (probably) going to have to provide them at least some of the information they are asking for.
To protect YOURSELF I would recommend that you redact any process-specific information (feeds/speeds/temperatures/pressures, etc) from the documents you provide........they can still reverse-engineer from the redacted information, but it would be much more difficult.

 

[ChrisM]

Don't give them anything unless you are contractually obliged to do so.... time to alert your bosses and maybe put your legal advisors on stand-by

 

[d_addams]

To maintain the 'good working relationship' that you currently have with your customer, you are (probably) going to have to provide them at least some of the information they are asking for.
To protect YOURSELF I would recommend that you redact any process-specific information (feeds/speeds/temperatures/pressures, etc) from the documents you provide........they can still reverse-engineer from the redacted information, but it would be much more difficult.

how we've done this in the past is to provide normalized values, no actual values. So if the temp settings was 500-550 degree, in the shared version it would be 1.0-1.1.

 

[Randy]

This is one of the reasons we have LAWYERS! Besides, if they're so smart they can just reverse engineer the stuff, make a tiny change and then knock themselves out making it. One way or the other you're SOL.

 

[JanKees]

Difficult question, i do not know enough of a full APQP to tell which documents are required for a full disclosure, but i do know that it is enough
to send proof of FMEA. So i learned to send when asked with PPAP only the headers of the needed FMEA. An FMEA could/should contain all information to produce a part correctly, so due to competition you don't want that shared. But we always accompanied that with the remark that the full FMEA was at their disposal with a visit. ofcourse, no pictures allowed. This was never a problem.
When i had a course on FMEA they explained that this is the way most automotive work. Mostly due to competition risks.

 

[Miner]

The typical documents required from the APQP perspective (i.e., above and beyond the usual dimensional, material test results, etc.) include:

- Control Plan
- Process Flow Diagram
- DFMEA (Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)
- PFMEA (Process Failure Mode and Effects Analysis)
- MSA Study (measurement system analysis)
- SPC (Statistical Process Control) and capability studies.

As @JanKees said though, most automotive OEMs allowed a certain amount of redacting of proprietary information. Work instructions were never part of the PPAP package.

 

[Johnny Quality]

In my experience I have only shared or recieved work instructions from customers when known business was either leaving or coming to us - there were no surprises.

This is not a discussion to have with the SQE, escalate higher.