Request for quotation process

The request for quotation (RFQ) process is the quotation route of sourcing: the buyer writes a fixed specification, sends it to a short list of suppliers or posts it publicly, receives unit prices, and awards to the lowest responsive quotation. There is no scored technical evaluation — conformance is checked, then price is compared. The whole process is built for speed.

Because the specification is fixed, the competition happens inside your cost model, not your prose. The winning skills are accurate estimating, tight overhead recovery, and clean cash-flow arithmetic; the losing move is quoting from a template price list. Two details deserve attention. Basis: whether taxes, freight, and duties are in or out decides comparisons, and a mismatched basis reads as an error. History: what the buyer has paid this category before is public in the award record, and it prices the market before you do — pubsec.pro exposes that history free alongside live quotations. If you cannot be structurally competitive at the quoted specification, the correct move is declining, not discounting.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-request-for-quotation-process,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {Request for quotation process — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/request-for-quotation-process},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}