The RFQ That Comes Back Right the First Time

Every buyer has received a quote that was clearly a guess: a suspiciously round number, a lead time with no commitment behind it, or a price that changed the moment someone actually looked at the drawing. That happens less often than people think because the shop was careless. It usually happens because the RFQ did not contain enough to quote from, and nobody wanted to be the one to say so.

What a shop is actually doing with your drawing

Pricing a machined part is a sequence of decisions: which process, which machine, how many setups, what tooling, what inspection, and how much of all that gets amortized across the quantity. Every one of those depends on information that either arrived with the RFQ or got assumed. Assumptions are where the padding comes from, because a shop that has to guess will guess in its own favor, and it should.

The seven items that remove the guessing

• What the part is, in one sentence. Context changes process decisions more than people expect.
• Material and condition, including target hardness if it is heat treated.
• Quantity, and whether this is a prototype, a pilot lot or a recurring release.
• The tightest tolerance on the print, and which feature carries it.
• The drawing or 3D model. PDF, STEP, IGES or DWG. A model without a drawing leaves tolerances undefined.
• The date you need it.
• Any documentation your quality group requires, since inspection and reporting are real cost.

Six of those take a minute. The fourth one is the one that changes the number most, and it is the one most often left out.

Why the tolerance line moves the price more than the quantity

Quantity scales cost in a way everyone intuits correctly. Tolerance does not: it changes which process makes the part at all. A feature at ±0.1 mm is a milling operation. The same feature at ±0.005 mm may require wire EDM or grinding, which is a different machine, a different rate and possibly a different sequence around heat treatment. Leave that line out and the shop either prices the safe interpretation, which is expensive, or the cheap one, which comes back as a revision later. We go deeper on this in machining tolerances.

The RFQ is not a form. It is the first engineering conversation.

Here is the shift worth making. A complete RFQ is not administrative diligence and it is not a favor to the supplier. It is the point where a competent shop can tell you something useful before you have spent anything: that the internal radius on your print cannot be milled, that the tolerance stack on two mating parts will not assemble, that the finish callout on a hidden face is adding cost for nothing, or that a change of process would be faster and cheaper than what you asked for.

A shop that quotes a flawed drawing without comment is not being efficient. It is deferring the problem to your receiving inspection, where it costs considerably more. The RFQ is the cheapest moment in the entire program to find out something is wrong, and an incomplete one throws that moment away.

One practical note on drawings

Do not send prints through a chat widget or an unsecured link. Send them to a real address with your company name attached, so they land in the quoting queue with traceability rather than in someone's messages. If you do not have a drawing at all, that is workable too: reverse engineering from a sample is a normal starting point, and it is worth saying so in the RFQ instead of waiting to be asked.