Record Retention Period & Documents under retention scope

Dear Team,

This is my first post here. I'm Mohan, responsible for managing MR at our company, which is certified to AS9100 and ISO 9001 standards. We supply to both aerospace and ISO customers. One of our AS customers mentions in their quality manual a retention period of 30 years, while another specifies 15 years, etc.

My question is, which documents fall under the scope of the 30-year retention period? Is it only final inspection documents or do in-process documents also apply? Additionally, what retention period should I communicate to our raw material suppliers?

I would greatly appreciate your advice on this matter.

Is there a problem with asking you customers this question? They'd be the ones with the most correct answers.

Our rule of thumb retention period is "Life of the Product" however you will have to talk to your customer(s) to find out what that realistically is.
We retain our inspection data, design information for the product (spec's and drawings) + material test certificates.

As I have mentioned before, we had a customer come to us wanting to fine us millions, 7 years after we had finished supplying them. If it wasn't for our record keeping we would have been in trouble, however because of our records we could prove there was no issue with what we had supplied.

As Randy has pointed out it is customer requirements. I included retention period requirements on my customer notes on our system.
As for your own retention periods, take a look at EN 9130.

Just to echo the other comments, your customer should be defining what documents require what retention period.

When this is clearly defined, I would definitely recommend you update your document control procedure to include a matrix showing the retention period of ALL documents (customer documents especially). Don't forget to include a 'document owner/responsible person' and a disposal method AND a record of that disposal.

I will ask customer for what documents under scope of mentioned years. thank you for your valuable feedback's.