Skip to content
CMMC Guidance

Specimen. Northfield Precision Works is a fictional 80-person machining supplier and does not exist. Every figure below is illustrative, and nothing here is a client’s data or a promised outcome.

Back to the Method

Scope statement

Northfield Precision Works

Period
Week 1
Context
Stage 01 of four

The decision

Recorded first, because everything below follows from it.

Enclave, not the whole environment

Assessing the full 80-person environment would have brought 62 additional endpoints, the shop-floor network, and every commercial ERP user into scope. Moving CUI into a defined enclave first reduced the assessed estate to 16 machines and 11 people. The enclave took four weeks to build and removed considerably more work than it created.

In the boundary

4 categories
CUI enclave
One virtual network holding the engineering file share, the ERP CUI module, and four workstations.
People
11 of 80 staff: engineering, quality, the contracts lead, and two IT administrators.
Endpoints
14 workstations and 2 servers, all company-owned and domain-joined.
External services
GCC High tenant for mail and file storage. One CAD vendor with supervised remote access.

Outside the boundary

3 exclusions

Each exclusion is stated as a claim an assessor can test, not as an assumption. This is the half of the document that gets challenged.

Shop floor
CNC controllers and the MES run on a separated VLAN and never receive CUI. Documented as a boundary, not an assumption.
Commercial ERP
The non-CUI side of the ERP, used by 60 staff for scheduling and purchasing.
Guest network
Physically and logically separate. No route to the enclave.

How CUI actually moves

Walked with the people who handle it, not inferred from a network diagram.

  1. 01A prime sends drawings to the contracts lead by email into the GCC High tenant.
  2. 02Engineering opens them from the enclave file share. Nothing is copied to a workstation desktop.
  3. 03Quality records inspection results against the drawing in the ERP CUI module.
  4. 04Finished packages return to the prime through the same tenant. Nothing leaves on removable media.

Prepared by The CMMCg Method, stage 01. No engineer is named on a specimen. On a real engagement this is signed by the engineer who did the work, and it is the same person who answers the phone afterward.

Scope is the highest-return hour in the engagement.

It is also the one most often skipped. Assessing the whole environment here would have brought 62 more endpoints and every commercial ERP user into the assessment, and none of them ever touch CUI.

Talk to an engineer