Ask a small machine shop where it loses the most jobs and the honest answer is rarely "on the machines." It is in the gap between a request for quote landing in an inbox and a price going back out the door. Quotes sit for days, drawings get lost in email threads, two people quote the same part differently, and by the time you respond the customer has already bought elsewhere. The RFQ process — not the shop floor — is where small shops bleed.

The fix is not more software for its own sake. It is a clear, repeatable workflow that every RFQ moves through, so nothing falls through the cracks and quoting stops depending on who happens to be free.

Stage 1: Intake — capture every request in one place

The first failure mode is fragmentation. RFQs arrive by email, phone, web form, and the occasional photo of a drawing texted from a customer's phone. If they live in scattered inboxes, you cannot see your pipeline, you cannot prioritize, and requests quietly expire.

Funnel every request into a single intake. Each RFQ should carry a customer, a received date, the drawings or files, and any quantity and delivery requirements. The goal is simple: one list, every open request, visible to everyone who quotes.

Stage 2: Triage — decide fast what is worth quoting

Not every RFQ deserves the same effort. A repeat part for a good customer is not the same as a one-off from someone who price-shops ten shops. Triage early:

• Quick win — a part you have made before or one squarely in your wheelhouse. Quote it fast.
• Worth the effort — new but a good fit; allocate proper estimating time.
• Politely decline or no-bid — outside your capabilities, unrealistic timeline, or a customer who never converts.

Triage protects your most valuable resource: estimating time. Spending an hour on a job you will not win, or cannot do, is the same as not quoting a job you would have won.

Stage 3: Drawing review and feature capture

Once an RFQ is worth quoting, review the drawing and pull out the cost drivers — material, dimensions, holes, threads, tolerances, finishes. This is the step that historically eats the most time and produces the most inconsistency, because two estimators reading the same print emphasize different things.

Standardize it. Use a consistent checklist of features so every part is captured the same way, regardless of who handles it. Tools that interpret the drawing automatically can do the first pass — extracting features for you to confirm — which both speeds up the review and forces consistency, since everyone starts from the same structured list.

Stage 4: Estimate from your own numbers

With features captured, build the estimate from rules, not memory. Machine time for each operation at your real hourly rate, material at current cost, setup time per operation, then your margin. When the estimate is calculated rather than guessed, a junior estimator and a veteran produce comparable numbers, and you can hand off quoting without quality dropping.

This is also where you protect margin. A calculated estimate makes underpricing visible before you send it, instead of discovering it after you have committed.

Stage 5: Quote and send — fast and professional

Turn the estimate into a clean, branded quote with the price, lead time, validity period, and terms. Send it the same day when you can. In competitive RFQs, the first credible quote often wins simply by being first while the customer is still paying attention.

Keep a record of what you sent, when, and at what price. That record is the backbone of the next stage.

Stage 6: Follow-up and learn

The work does not end at "sent." A short, scheduled follow-up — a couple of days later — recovers a surprising number of jobs that would otherwise drift. And every closed RFQ, won or lost, is data: track your win rate, the prices that win versus lose, and which customers convert. Over a few months that history tells you where to focus and where you are leaving money on the table.

Making the workflow stick

A workflow only helps if it is actually followed, which means it has to be lighter than the chaos it replaces. Two principles keep it sustainable:

• One system of record. Every RFQ, its files, its status, and its quote in one place — not spread across inboxes and spreadsheets.
• Standardized estimating. Rates, materials, and feature capture defined once, so quoting is review and confirmation rather than reinvention.

Get those two right and the six stages flow naturally. RFQs stop disappearing, response times drop, quotes become consistent, and quoting stops being the thing that holds your shop back.

If you want a single place to run this workflow — intake, drawing review, estimate, and quote — see how QuoteBuddy handles RFQs or compare the pricing plans for small shops.