RFQs that arrive by email and wait until someone checks

Picture a purchase engineer at a plant in Chakan sending one RFQ, with a drawing and a due date, to five vendors at eleven in the morning. By evening two sensible replies have come in, and those two may make the shortlist. In an owner-run unit, the same RFQ may sit in the owner's personal Gmail, in a departed sales engineer's mailbox, or in spam. Fix the plumbing first: one RFQ address on every customer's vendor record, an owner for each RFQ, fixed times to check, and a reply deadline nobody negotiates.

Where do RFQs wait in a small unit?

Purchase teams at MIDC plants across Maharashtra may send the same enquiry to several vendors at once and shortlist early replies that make sense. Your reply cannot be first if nobody has seen the mail. Ask your team to trace where recent RFQs actually landed, then look in these places:

• The owner's personal Gmail, written on a vendor registration form years ago and still sitting in the customer's vendor master.
• A former salesperson's mailbox, still open after they left and read by nobody.
• Spam, where mail carrying a large zip file or a download link can land. Nobody looks there.
• A supplier portal notification, sent to whoever registered the vendor code, who may well be the accountant.
• An old quotation thread, where the buyer replied to last year's mail with a new drawing attached.

None of these is a lazy employee. Each is a setting nobody changed. The RFQ is simply not where anyone looks.

One RFQ address, on every vendor record

Create one address for RFQs on your own domain, such as rfq@ or sales@, and give at least two people access to it. Then work through this list, in order.

1. Forward every old address into it: the departed salesperson's mailbox, the info@ a web developer once set up, and the owner's address for anything from a customer's domain.
2. Ask each customer's purchase team which email their vendor master holds for you, and send the change on letterhead.
3. Update the contact email on every supplier portal where you hold a vendor code.
4. Mark each customer's domain as safe, so their mail and attachments skip the spam folder.
5. Put the new address on your website, your IndiaMART listing and your company profile, and take the old ones down.

Step two means phone calls, because purchase teams change vendor details only on request. It is also the step that finds the RFQs you never knew about.

Fixed check times and an owner for each RFQ

Decide when the RFQ inbox is opened, write the times on the wall and keep them. Three checks a day is a sensible start: at opening, after lunch and an hour before the office shuts. At each check the person on duty does three jobs. Log every new RFQ with its due date. Name its owner, the person who will cost it. Send a short acknowledgement that asks for anything missing.

Replying to buyers before lunch when the owner is on the shop floor covers the first reply itself.

If more than one person costs RFQs, decide ownership by a rule, never by whoever is free. Split by customer, by process or by part family, and write it down.

The deadline rule

The buyer's RFQ carries a due date. Yours is one working day earlier. If the owner of an RFQ cannot meet your date, the owner tells the buyer before it passes, gives a new date and asks whether it still works. Never after. A buyer told on Thursday that the quote comes on Monday can plan. One who hears nothing has already compared the others.

Sort the RFQ log by your internal date, not by the day each RFQ arrived. One line per RFQ is enough:

RFQ 0412 · [customer], Chakan · forged flange, rev C · due Friday, ours Thursday · owner: costing engineer · acknowledged Monday 2 pm

Five status words cover every line: acknowledged, costing, questions sent, quoted, regretted. Anything else is a note. What goes into the quote, including how to regret politely, is set out in what to put in an RFQ reply. Once it has gone, someone owns the follow-up.

For example: a forging unit in Ahilyanagar

Imagine a closed-die forging unit in the Ahilyanagar (Ahmednagar) MIDC, making flanges and gear blanks for valve and gearbox makers around Pune. The unit is illustrative.

A Pune valve maker sent an RFQ for flanges in three sizes, with 3D models behind a download link and a due date eight days out. It went to the address on the unit's vendor registration. That address belonged to a sales engineer who had left the year before. The mailbox was still open, and nobody read it. The buyer's reminder on day six went to the same place. The unit learned of the RFQ a month later, when the buyer mentioned it on a call. The order, about ₹6 lakh (an invented figure), had gone to a forge near Pune, and the link had expired.

Every old address now forwards into a new rfq@ mailbox, read by the owner's daughter and the costing engineer. Getting there meant a fortnight of calls. The purchase teams of all twelve regular customers were asked which address they held, and most had an old one; two took months to change it. The inbox is checked at nine, two and five. The costing engineer owns every RFQ for flanges and blanks, and the owner keeps anything from a new customer. Models are downloaded the day they arrive.

When this is more than you need

Some units receive only a handful of RFQs, and the owner reads mail on a phone all day. There, a shared inbox adds a step without fixing much. Keep the vendor-record check and the deadline rule, and skip the rest. If most RFQs arrive through customers' supplier portals with formal bid dates, the portal is the inbox. Point its notifications at the RFQ address and log from there. And if your buyers send everything on WhatsApp, this is the wrong fix altogether.

Ask three customers which address they hold

Start by asking your three biggest customers which email address their vendor master holds for you. If any answer surprises you, that is where the missing RFQs went. Setting up the inbox, the routing rule and the log is lead response and follow-up; tell us what you need to start.