Write a confidential case study about the manufacturing problem and what your plant did about it, and leave the customer's part out of it. A buyer can learn a lot from the material, the process, the tolerance band, the volume range, and the inspection approach, and none of that requires a drawing, a part number, or a program name. Check every draft against the customer's agreement and get written approval of the final text before it goes live.
Contract manufacturers and job shops can hold their best proof under nondisclosure agreements. The customer owns the design, the print carries their title block, and the product it goes into may not be public yet. The result is a website where the hardest work the shop has done never appears, and a prospective buyer judging capability sees a building photo and a machine list.
This is a content-planning question for manufacturing owners and marketing leads, not legal or export compliance advice. Your customer agreements govern what you may disclose, and your counsel and export compliance owner make those calls.
Separate the customer's design from your plant's problem-solving
A prospective buyer reads a case study for evidence that your team can handle a problem like theirs. That evidence usually lives in what your people did, not in the geometry of the part. A customer's print is not the same thing as your process knowledge. The fixturing change that removed a second setup, the inspection plan for a feature that kept drifting, the moment an engineer flagged a callout that could not be held as drawn and proposed an alternative: those are the parts of the story a buyer can learn from. Some of them may still fall under the agreement, which is why the agreement gets read first.
| Detail | Check the agreement before using | A general version to propose instead |
|---|---|---|
| Customer | Name, logo, facility location | The industry only, such as "a medical device company" |
| Part | Photos, print excerpts, part numbers, revision letters | The part family, such as "a machined aluminum housing" |
| Specifications | Dimensions and tolerances copied from the print | The tolerance band your shop holds on that process in general |
| Volume | Annual usage, release schedule, launch timing | A description such as "low-volume production" |
| End product | Program or product name | The application, such as "a handheld instrument" |
| Your method | Details your own team wants to keep proprietary | The approach in one sentence, without the settings |
Photos and drawings carry more than the subject
A shop-floor photo can show a revision letter on a traveler, a customer name on a bin label, or a print lying on the bench behind the part. Whoever approves images should study the background as closely as the subject. For defense-related programs the question becomes regulatory, because the ITAR definition of technical data at 22 CFR 120.33 names photographs and drawings among its forms; our page on presenting capabilities beyond an equipment list covers what that means for part photos.
Case studies raise a second point. Under 22 CFR 120.50, "releasing or otherwise transferring technical data to a foreign person in the United States" is treated as a deemed export. A case study often travels beyond the website: it can be reused in sales decks, printed for trade shows, and talked through on plant tours. That is why any story, photo, or diagram connected to a defense program belongs with your export compliance owner before it is used anywhere, and why the decision is theirs rather than marketing's. Section 120.33(b) leaves basic marketing information on function or purpose, and general system descriptions of defense articles, out of the definition, but deciding which side of that line a particular story falls on is their call too. Your compliance owner can also tell you whether other export rules apply to the commercial work you describe.
Ask for permission in tiers, and ask early
Give the customer real choices: named with a quote, described by industry only, or folded into a general capability statement that describes no single customer. The easiest moment to ask is when a job has just gone well, such as a clean first-article approval or a successful production release, rather than years later when the contact has moved on. Your day-to-day contact may not have authority to approve, so ask who does, which can be their purchasing, legal, or marketing team.
Anonymizing works best when someone close to the account tests the draft. Before drafting anything, put one question to the program manager who knows the account: "If this customer's competitor read the draft, could they tell who it was or what they are building?" If the answer is yes, keep generalizing. Then send the customer the finished text, not a summary, and file their written approval with the date, the approver, and the exact version. Revisit the story whenever the shop changes how it runs that kind of work, since a case study built on a retired method misleads the next buyer who reads it.
A fictional example from a machining shop
The outline below belongs to a fictional contract machining shop in Wisconsin. It shows structure only and describes no real company, part, or result.
The situation: an industrial equipment maker moved a stainless manifold block to the shop after its previous supplier's parts were leaking at cross-drilled ports during the customer's final test. The change: the shop's engineer reviewed the print with the customer's engineer, added a deburring and inspection step at each port intersection, and added a pressure test before shipment, all recorded in the first-article package. The result: the case study states what the shop tracked, over which lots, and how, rather than a broad claim about quality. What it leaves out: the customer's name, the part number, the dimensions, the volume, and the machine the manifold goes into.
A buyer with a leak problem can still see what the shop did and how it checked the fix. Writing that passage takes the engineer who designed the deburring step, because the writer should not be guessing how it worked or why it mattered. Pull the inspection records and the engineer's own explanation first, then draft from them.
Where the case study sits on the site
Place each case study next to the process it proves, and make sure the two pages agree. If the case study describes five-axis work in titanium, the process page should state the same capability in the same terms, or one of the two pages is wrong. A case study that hinges on a first-article package also gives you a reason to link to how your shop handles prototyping and first-article inspection.
In Hudson South's process, the Authority Asset gathers the approved records, permissions, and engineering explanations behind each story. Hudson Twenty-One records how your team communicates across 21 dimensions, so the case study reads the way your engineers explain their work. Market Intelligence researches which manufacturing problems your prospective buyers ask about, and AEO Creation turns those inputs into answer-first case studies with the conditions attached. Our article on matching proof to the buyer's decision looks at evidence more broadly, and the manufacturing and industrial overview lists every page in this set.
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- 22 CFR Part 120: Purpose and Definitions. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. Read 2026-10-16.