Writing an RFQ for Machined Parts: The 12 Items a Drawing Misses

Hello, this is Ryuta Hamamoto from TIMEWELL.

"I sent the drawing and the quote never came back."

Buyers and design engineers say this all the time. The assumption is that the shop is busy. More often, the shop is stuck because it cannot answer.

Without a quantity they cannot allocate setup cost. Surface treatment changes the routing. Whether a certificate of conformance is required changes the hours. Whether you supply the material changes the whole shape of the quote. None of that is usually on the drawing.

This piece sets out the 12 items that belong alongside it, and there is a form at the end you can send as is.

The short version:

• Most non-responses are the shop lacking information it cannot invent
• Generic RFQ templates stop at part name, quantity, and date. They have no fields for machining
• Revision, quantity, and date live outside the drawing. Miss these and the enquiry stalls
• Anything in the remarks box gets skipped. Give each item its own field
• The more shops you send it to, the more explicit confidentiality needs to be

Twelve things the drawing does not tell them

1. Drawing number and revision. The most important one. Quoting against one revision and then ordering against another is not a rare accident. Write your internal notation as-is — Rev.3, Issue B, whatever you use. When you swap a drawing out, record whether the old one was pulled back.

2. Material and specification. Usually on the drawing, but whether you accept an alternative is not. If the specified grade is out of stock, may they substitute an equivalent, or must they come back and ask? Stating this removes one round trip.

3. Who supplies the material. Do they buy it, or do you send it? If you send it, when, where, and who transports it. If you can also state who owns the yield risk on supplied material, do.

4. Quantity and how it repeats. "Ten pieces" is not enough. Ten once, or ten a month ongoing? Setup allocation changes completely. If repeat business is likely, say so and they can price on that basis.

5. How tolerance is handled. Is general tolerance fine, or are specific features critical? This is also where you say whether you want suggestions for an easier-to-make form. If value engineering proposals are welcome, say so and they will come.

6. Surface treatment. Type, thickness, area, masking. And who accounts for the dimensional change. Whether a dimension is before or after plating is an argument that repeats forever unless it is stated.

7. Heat treatment. Type, hardness, area. Whether extra stock is needed for distortion.

8. Inspection requirements and documents. 100% or sampling. List what you need — inspection reports, material certificates, declarations of non-inclusion for restricted substances. These drive hours directly, so raising them later is the worst option.

9. Target date, and how firm it is. Not just a date: is it movable or not? If it is not, give the reason — the customer's line start, say — and the priority comes across.

10. Packaging and delivery point. Packing spec, destination, whether partial shipments are acceptable. The bigger the quantity, the more this matters.

11. Items you are providing. Beyond material: fixtures, components, gauges. And whether they are on loan or consumed.

12. Confidentiality. If an NDA exists, state it with its date. If not, state that the drawing is for quotation purposes only and may not be disclosed to third parties. Most important when the same drawing is going to several shops.

Nobody reads the remarks box

Some people put all twelve into a remarks field. Do not do this.

The receiving side looks at the drawing first, then hunts for quantity and date. The remarks box comes last, if at all. Long remarks in particular get skimmed past.

Give each item a field, and write "none" where it does not apply. Make "not stated" distinguishable from "not required." That alone cuts the back-and-forth substantially.

For the same reason, avoid putting conditions in the email body. Emails get forwarded, quoting breaks, and when the contact changes it is gone. Put it on one sheet and send it with the drawing.

Competitive bids need extra care

When the same drawing goes to several shops, a few more things apply.

Give everyone the same conditions. Obvious, and yet a verbal clarification to one supplier happens easily. Do that and the comparison is void.

State a response deadline. Without one, the replies do not arrive together.

Be explicit about confidentiality. A competitive bid means the same drawing goes to several companies. Make sure the internal risk of sending drawings to a party you have no NDA with is understood. Drawings carry design know-how.

Tell the losers. Not replying to a shop that spent hours on a quote costs you next time.

There is more on the rights side in drawings, AI, and the trade secret boundary.

The buyer's paperwork has legal requirements too

One more practical point, specific to Japan.

When you actually place the order after the quote, the buyer has an obligation to issue written terms. The content of the work, the subcontract price, the payment date and method and other items are prescribed, and the documents must be created and retained. The retention period for transaction records is two years¹.

The amendment that took effect on 1 January 2026 added "dies and similar tooling other than metal moulds" to the scope of manufacturing subcontracting — specifically wooden patterns, workholding fixtures, forming dies, and dedicated special tooling. Previously only metal moulds were covered². If you have fixtures made outside, check whether your transactions now fall inside.

The same material also addresses storing tooling at no charge. Tooling you have not ordered against for over a year, where the supplier has asked to scrap or return it, where you cannot indicate an order window for the coming year, and where there is no plan to reuse it — continuing to have that stored for free can be a problem. Even where the supplier owns the tooling, if the buyer effectively controls it, the same treatment applies².

Settling who holds tooling and fixtures at the RFQ stage prevents a lot of this later.

The form

There is an RFQ form for machined parts laying out these 12 items in Excel, ready to send.

It is built so that fields do not stay blank — where an item does not apply you pick "none", so the receiving side can tell the difference between an oversight and a genuine non-requirement. For competitive bids you swap the addressee and the deadline and reuse it.

The download link is at the end of this article.

Five of the twelve are already in the drawing

A short word about our product.

Of the items above, material, tolerance, surface treatment, heat treatment, and inspection requirements are all drawn on the print already. Whoever writes the RFQ is copying them across. A few minutes per enquiry, which in a busy purchasing department adds up — and every transcription is a chance to get a digit wrong.

Our enterprise AI, ZEROCK, helps by reading those items off the drawing and drafting the request. What the person does is fill in what is not on the drawing — quantity, date, supply split, confidentiality — and check the extraction.

As always, this assumes the form already exists. Automating into an undefined format gives the output nowhere to go. Settle the form first.

There is more on quoting from drawings in quoting from drawings, and on time build-up in estimating machining time.

In summary

• Quotes stall mostly because the shop lacks information it cannot invent
• Twelve items belong with the drawing. Revision, quantity, and date are outside it
• The remarks box does not get read. Use fields, and write "none" where it does not apply
• Competitive bids need equal conditions, a deadline, explicit confidentiality, and a reply to the losers
• Order paperwork has prescribed content and a two-year retention period; from January 2026 fixtures and wooden patterns are in scope
• What is drawn on the print can be extracted into a draft — but decide the form first

If you want help building an RFQ format, or extracting from drawings, get in touch.

References

Footnotes

1. Leaflet on the Act on Ensuring Appropriate Transactions in Manufacturing Subcontracting (Japan Fair Trade Commission, August 2025, Japanese). The prescribed content of order documents and the two-year creation and retention obligation come from this material ↩

2. Key points of the amendment (SME Agency, briefing material, 14 October 2025, Japanese). The addition of dies and tooling other than metal moulds — wooden patterns, workholding fixtures, forming dies, dedicated special tooling — effective 1 January 2026, and the treatment of no-charge tooling storage, come from this material ↩ ↩²