The sale can be sitting on your shelf

At 08:17 an airline sends the same RFQ to a handful of suppliers. The request is ordinary: one part number, a quantity, a condition and a delivery point. You have the part. The trace is clean. The price is known.

The person who knows the stock position is finishing another quote. Someone else sees the email, but leaves it unread because the subject line looks routine. By the time the reply goes out, the buyer already has three workable offers.

Nothing dramatic happened. That is precisely the problem. The company lost a bid it could have won, and the reason will probably never appear in the sales report.

An RFQ has a clock

Parts traders tend to treat the shared inbox as a list: oldest email first, except when somebody notices AOG in the subject. An RFQ is closer to a small, time-limited market. Several suppliers may be looking at the same requirement, each with a different stock position and cost base.

Replying first is useful when the buyer needs speed and your offer is ready. It is not a universal strategy. A routine requirement with a stated closing time may deserve a deliberate price and a scheduled response. An AOG request should move immediately. A request you cannot fulfil should be declined quickly so nobody keeps revisiting it.

The important thing is that timing becomes a decision. It should not depend on when somebody happens to open the email.

The first decision is whether to bid

Before anyone writes a quote, the request needs a basic commercial check. Is the part actually available? Does its condition match? Is the required certification present? Can it reach the customer when promised? Is the quantity sensible? Does the customer have agreed terms?

A useful system can pull those facts together when the email arrives. Straightforward requests move towards a draft. Exceptions go to a person. Requests with missing information are flagged for clarification. Obvious no-bids are closed instead of occupying the team all afternoon.

This is where much of the time disappears today: not in the final act of writing an email, but in repeatedly gathering enough information to decide whether an answer is worth preparing.

A good price is not simply the lowest price

Pricing under inbox pressure encourages two bad habits. Teams either reuse the last number they remember, or discount early because speed feels more important than margin.

A sensible bid starts with evidence: acquisition cost, target margin, customer terms, stock age, quantity, availability elsewhere and the time left in the buying window. The result may be a price range rather than one supposedly perfect number. That is fine. The commercial person still makes the commitment.

What matters is that the inputs sit beside the draft. If a price comes from a spreadsheet, the user should be able to see the file, sheet and cell. If a customer has special terms, those should be visible too. Nobody should have to trust a mysterious recommendation simply because it arrived quickly.

Automate the preparation, keep the judgement

The practical workflow is fairly simple:

  • Read the incoming RFQ and extract the part number, quantity, condition, aircraft details and deadline.
  • Check stock, documentation, customer terms and approved pricing sources.
  • Recommend bid, clarify or decline, with the relevant facts shown.
  • Prepare the reply and place it in the right position in the team's queue.
  • Let a person approve the price, promise and send time.

This removes searching, retyping and forgotten deadlines. It does not hand commercial authority to a black box.

Measure the bids that disappear

Most teams can tell you how many quotes they sent. Fewer can say how many suitable RFQs expired without a response, how long a routine quote waited before anyone touched it, or how often the quoted margin changed because the deadline was close.

Start with six numbers: RFQs received, bid rate, median response time, expired RFQs, win rate and gross margin. Split AOG from routine demand. The picture becomes useful very quickly.

The goal is not to make every email instantaneous. It is to make sure a good order is not lost because a bid sat unnoticed, was priced from memory or left the building five minutes after the window closed.