How to cut RFQ response time from 10 days to 1
A package lands on a Tuesday morning. Six files, a revision C print, a cost breakdown form the buyer expects returned in their own format.
The part is well inside what the floor runs every week, and the sales head who logged it would tell you, honestly, that pricing it is about 4 hours of real work.
The quote goes out the following Thursday, 9 working days later. Nobody was lazy and nobody made a mistake in between. That is the uncomfortable part, because it means the delay is structural, and structural delays do not respond to effort.
The 10 day benchmark that most manufacturers carry is a scheduling problem rather than a difficulty problem. The work inside a quote has not grown harder. The number of people whose calendars have to line up before it can move has grown, and each of those alignments is purchased in days.
Where the days actually go
Follow the package honestly and the shape appears. The request gets logged on day 1, usually within an hour of arriving, because logging is easy and nobody has to wait for anyone to do it. Then it sits.
The head of estimation has 9 other quotes open, 2 of them in revision, and this one enters the queue behind them. The serious work starts on day 3 or day 4, when the print gets read properly for the first time, the part gets broken into operations, and the lines start to get priced.
Then comes the second wait. Somewhere on the floor is a person who has made this part, or one close to it, and their memory of what the print is hiding is worth more than any handbook. They are also running a cell, or chasing a late supplier, or on the other shift.
The half-built quote waits for them the way a job waits for an open machine. When they finally sit down together the check itself takes an hour, most of it spent rebuilding context the estimator already had 3 days earlier.
The calendar is the cost.
Around day 7 a revision lands, because buyers revise, and some fraction of the work gets done a second time. The final review happens when the general manager is back at a desk, and the quote leaves on day 9 or day 10.
The 4 hours inside them
Strip the waiting out and what remains is short. Half an hour to log the package properly, which means actually opening every file rather than filing them.
Around 2 hours for the takeoff and the pricing build, reading the print, sequencing the operations, applying cycle time and the burdened rate at each work center, and pricing material off the bar.
An hour for the specialist pass, which exists because prints hide things and experience finds them. Half an hour for commercial review and sending.
None of those 4 hours is the bottleneck. On a well run floor each one, taken alone, happens the same day it is asked for. The bottleneck is that they belong to 3 different people, and the quote cannot move until each person is free in sequence.
Hand-offs are the mechanism
Every hand-off adds queue time, and queue time is invisible on a costing sheet. When the estimator passes the half-finished quote to the specialist, the price of that pass is not the hour of checking.
It is the 2 days the file waits plus the 20 minutes of context the specialist rebuilds before the checking starts.
Queue time is invisible.
When the specialist passes it back, the estimator pays the same context tax in reverse. A 3 person chain with 2 hand-offs turns 4 hours of work into most of 2 weeks without anyone noticing a single day being lost, because each individual wait looks reasonable from where that person stands.
The failure compounds in a way that is easy to miss. A team that is behind protects the week by picking off the quotes it can turn quickly, and the complicated requests, which carry the program money, sink to the bottom of the pile.
So the delay is not distributed evenly across the work. It concentrates on exactly the quotes that were worth the most.
This is also why the obvious fix, hiring another estimator, disappoints so reliably. A fourth person added to a 3 person chain does not shorten the chain, and if the new hire becomes another mandatory stop, the chain grows.
Capacity was never the constraint on a floor where 4 hours of work takes 9 days. The constraint was sequencing, and sequencing problems are indifferent to headcount.
The revision tax
Revisions deserve their own line in this accounting, because the queue does not only delay the work, it multiplies it. A buyer who has not heard back in a week keeps engineering, and revision C arrives while the quote built on revision B sits half checked.
Somebody now has to establish what changed, and without a disciplined comparison that means rereading the package. The longer the response time, the more revisions land inside it, and each one restarts some fraction of the 4 hours.
Hiring adds a calendar.
A same day answer usually beats the revision out the door entirely, which is the quietest saving in the whole change.
There is also the variance. A 10 day average is never 10 days on every quote. It is 6 on the easy ones and 15 on the complicated ones, and buyers remember the 15.
Consistency is a commercial asset in its own right, and a chain with 2 hand-offs cannot deliver it, because every queue in the chain contributes its own bad week.
What removing the hand-offs takes
The fix is not a faster estimator, and it is usually not another estimator either, because adding a person to a chain adds a calendar to the alignment problem. The fix is arranging the work so the 3 contributions happen in one sitting instead of 3.
That takes 3 specific changes. First, the package has to arrive at the estimator already read. Files opened, the part identified, volumes and program length extracted, the buyer’s form recognised, so the 2 hour build starts at minute zero instead of after an hour of archaeology.
Second, the specialist’s knowledge has to be in the room during the build rather than after it.
In practice that means the build works from what similar parts actually cost the last time they ran, so the print’s hidden features show up as flagged lines with money attached, and the specialist reviews exceptions in minutes instead of rebuilding the whole part in their head.
Speed costs nothing.
Third, revisions have to be diffs. When revision C lands, the only work redone is the 3 lines revision C touched.
Do those and the sequence collapses. The build happens the morning the package arrives, the specialist pass happens over a coffee, the review happens before the end of the day. Same people, same standards, one calendar instead of 3.
We walk the build itself, line by line on a real part, in how to quote a machined part, and the tooling routes for making the 3 changes stick are compared honestly in the buyer’s guide.
What changes commercially
Speed is worth money for a reason that has nothing to do with the price on the quote. A buyer assembling a shortlist works with the answers in hand. The quote that arrives on day 1 frames the comparison, and the one that arrives on day 10 gets compared against it. Same number, different position.
The arithmetic is worth doing on your own figures, and the homepage carries an illustrative version of it. A floor receiving 120 requests a month and fully pricing 40 is leaving 80 unanswered, and those 80 skew toward the complicated, higher value work that got set aside.
Answer all 120 inside a day and 2 things move at once, the number of quotes in the market and the win rate on each, because more of them arrive first.
At an illustrative $22,000 average award, that is the difference between roughly $2.1M and $9.5M in new contract revenue a year. Your mix will produce a different pair of numbers, which is exactly why it should be run on your mix.
There is a quieter effect on the sales side. A sales head who knows every request lands on 3 people already underwater stops bringing requests back.
They skip the marginal enquiry and let the quiet buyer stay quiet, so the pipeline shrinks to fit the estimating capacity without anyone announcing the policy. Give sales a same day answer to sell and that self-censorship reverses on its own.
The 10 days were never the cost of care. They were the cost of the calendar, and the calendar is the one input a manufacturer can actually change without touching the floor.