The short definition
A request for quotation is the document a buyer sends when they know what they want and need to know what it costs. The defining characteristic is that the specification is settled. The buyer is not exploring options or asking how you would approach a problem; they are asking for a firm number against a drawing.
That distinction is what separates an RFQ from the two documents it is most often confused with, and it decides how a manufacturer should respond to each.
RFQ, RFI and RFP are not the same thing
A request for information, or RFI, comes earlier. The buyer is mapping the market: who can do this kind of work, what capacity do they have, what certifications do they hold, what are their typical lead times. There is often no drawing attached and no firm quantity. The correct response is a capability statement, not a price, and a shop that answers an RFI with a detailed quote has spent estimating hours on a document that was never going to produce an order.
A request for proposal, or RFP, sits at the other end. The buyer has a problem rather than a specification, and they are asking suppliers to propose a solution. RFPs are common in engineer-to-order work, capital equipment and systems integration. The response is a proposal with a scope, a technical approach, assumptions, exclusions and a commercial structure. It takes days or weeks rather than hours.
An RFQ is the middle case and the most common one in job shop and contract manufacturing work. The specification exists, usually as a drawing at a stated revision. The buyer wants a price, a lead time and a validity period. What they are comparing across suppliers is largely price and delivery, which is why response time matters disproportionately.
What a complete RFQ contains
A well-formed manufacturing RFQ carries enough information that an estimator can price it without asking a question. In practice perhaps a third of inbound RFQs meet that standard, and chasing the missing information is one of the largest single consumers of estimating time in a typical shop.
- Part number and revision, matching a drawing that is attached or already held
- Drawing or model, at a stated revision, with tolerances and surface finish legible
- Quantity, and ideally the quantity breaks the buyer wants priced
- Material specification, including grade, condition and any certification requirement
- Process requirements and any outside operations called on the print
- Inspection requirements: first article, certificates of conformance, PPAP level
- Required delivery date and whether it is firm or a target
- Packaging, labelling and shipping instructions where they affect cost
- Quote validity expectation and the buyer's terms
Why the drawing revision matters more than anything else on the list
Of everything an RFQ carries, the drawing revision is the field that causes the most expensive failures when it is wrong or missing. A quote priced against revision C and an order placed against revision D are not the same job, and the difference is usually discovered after material has been cut.
The failure is rarely anybody's fault. A customer's engineering department releases a revision and tells purchasing, and purchasing places an order without realising the supplier quoted the previous version. Both sides behaved reasonably. The only reliable protection is that the quote records which revision it priced, and that the purchase order is compared against that record before the job is released.
How a manufacturer should handle an inbound RFQ
The first decision is not how to price it but whether to price it. A shop with two estimators and forty inbound requests a week cannot properly quote all forty, so a triage step is unavoidable. Doing it deliberately — against part family, quantity band, customer history and whether the work sits inside your capability envelope — produces better outcomes than the default, which is quoting whichever request happens to be on top.
The second decision is completeness. An RFQ missing a tolerance, a material grade or a quantity should generate a question back to the buyer within the hour, not sit in a queue until an estimator opens it three days later and discovers it cannot be priced. Parking incomplete requests with a clock on the outstanding question is one of the cheapest process improvements available to a shop.
The third is the response itself, which should be a firm price, a firm lead time, a stated validity period and an explicit list of what is and is not included. And where the answer is no, a same-day decline with a reason is genuinely better for the relationship than silence. Buyers running their own clock value a fast no; they remember a week of nothing.
RFQ in the wider workflow
In an RFQ-to-Order workflow the request is the first record and everything downstream inherits from it. The quote references the RFQ. The revisions reference the quote. The acceptance locks a revision. The purchase order is matched against the locked revision. The order handed to production carries the part, revision, quantity and price that survived that match.
Treating the RFQ as a first-class record rather than as an email with attachments is what makes that chain possible. It is also what makes response time measurable, because the clock starts when the request arrives rather than when somebody remembers it exists.
Common mistakes
Treating an RFQ as a sales lead is the first. A lead is a name and an interest; an RFQ is a specification with a deadline, and a pipeline stage does not capture forty line items with drawing revisions.
Splitting a large RFQ across several quotes is the second. A ninety-line request quoted as three unrelated documents is impossible for a buyer to compare and impossible for you to revise coherently.
Not recording no-bids is the third. A declined RFQ with a reason is market data. A declined RFQ with no record is a hole in your understanding of what work you are turning away and why.