Industrialist Paper No. 6
The RFQ Noise Floor
Priority poison
When I worked on advertising software, I watched a routing queue collapse because of one override. We ran an optimizer across campaign IDs, pacing curves, impression caps, and monthly budgets, and the only thing an operator could touch was a priority flag called BBB (Burn Baby, Burn). BBB forced one campaign to the front of the delivery queue, so the spend line climbed, and the dashboard looked “fixed.” Then other operators used BBB to protect their own campaigns, and soon the allocator could not distinguish priority from background noise, even though the inventory pool and the model were unchanged. We recovered by removing BBB everywhere at once and forcing every campaign back through one queue, which felt risky in the moment because the only visible lever was gone.
Manufacturing hits the same failure mode without a single switch you can disable over a weekend. The working objects are a drawing PDF, a STEP model, a revision letter, a tolerance block, a material spec, a finish note, a ship date, and an inspection plan, and priority gets expressed by behavior instead of a flag. Buyers broadcast RFQs to twenty shops, add “urgent” to the subject line, and call the owner, while shops reshuffle the schedule board and bump travelers ahead of work that was already released. When urgency becomes the default wrapper for ordinary packets, urgency stops carrying information and the RFQ channel turns into a noise source instead of a routing layer.
The common failure that buyers and suppliers both recognize
Most RFQs are not demand, they are uncertainty being broadcast at scale. The package arrives with a drawing PDF and a STEP file, but the revision letter is unstable, the note block conflicts with the title block, the tolerance block is tight with no implied inspection method, and the cert requirement is either missing or implied by tribal knowledge. The buyer wants a price to resolve internal ambiguity, so the system sends the packet to everyone who looks plausible on a capability list, because blasting is cheaper than clarifying datum intent or acceptance criteria. On the supplier side, every wrong recipient still opens the drawing, checks material and finish, scans the GD&T frames, and decides whether the part fits the machine envelope and the cert stack, which consumes estimator-hours across the network before a single PO exists. That cost is real, and it shows up later as higher quote prices, longer quoted lead times, and silence when the inbox saturates.
Shops do not quote “parts,” they process packets, and the packet has to be routable. A routable packet is one where an estimator can map the drawing to setups, fixturing, tool access, outside processes, and an inspection plan without guessing, because guessing becomes scrap, rework, or a missed ship date once the traveler is on the floor. The hidden constraint in the U.S. is that quoting steals time from the same people who run a spindle, write a probe routine, or build a fixture, so the quote queue is often tighter than the machine queue. Buyers see an unanswered email and assume the part is hard to make, while the shop is often rejecting the unpaid work of interpreting an ambiguous tolerance block and chasing a buyer for answers. When the quote queue is the bottleneck, the shop protects it the same way it protects any constrained cell, by filtering packets based on completeness, buyer responsiveness, and expected award probability.
Why the U.S. inbox black holes
Buyer expectations and supplier reality are on a collision course, and the artifacts make the collision obvious. Paperless Parts has published survey results that 67% of buyers expect a quote in under 24 hours, and only 6% are willing to wait longer than three days, which sets the default tempo for the RFQ channel. On the supplier side, Paperless Parts marketing materials and a third party release cite that quoting a single component can take up to two hours, and complex assemblies can take up to four days, before any time is spent on workholding, routing, or an inspection plan tied to a traveler. If a shop receives twenty packets a day and even a fraction are “two hour” packets, the estimator queue becomes the hard limit, and silence becomes a rational response, not a cultural failure.
Overseas quoting behavior looks different because quote labor is cheaper, and the quoting function is often staffed like a clerical pipeline. A supplier can respond with a number quickly because the cost of being wrong is deferred into assumptions, change orders, and loose inspection expectations, and the buyer is buying a price signal more than a stable work package. In the U.S., many shops cannot afford that style because the quote work competes directly with machine time and CMM programming, and the shop is held accountable on a traveler with a rev letter, a cert packet, and a ship date. The predictable outcome is that U.S. suppliers become selective, quote repeat buyers, and ignore broadcast packets that look like fishing, which is the black hole behavior buyers complain about.
The noise floor and the spiral
Every RFQ channel has a noise floor, the point where adding more RFQs reduces useful responses rather than increasing awards. Above that line, suppliers stop investing time in unclear drawings, response rates fall, and the best shops disengage first because they have stable work coming in through direct relationships and cleaner packets. Buyers react by widening the blast list, adding more urgency, and pushing more packets into more inboxes, which increases triage labor and pushes more shops into silence. The output looks like a market problem, but the mechanism is a representation problem: a routing layer cannot route what is not expressed as a complete packet, and it cannot learn when silence disappears into email.
You can see the noise floor in measurable rates attached to an RFQ record and the artifacts that follow it. A buyer with a high no-response rate is not receiving “supplier feedback,” they are broadcasting packets that are too expensive to interpret relative to expected award probability. A shop with a low quote-to-PO conversion is burning estimator-hours on low quality demand, and the shop will eventually protect itself by quoting slower, quoting higher, or quoting only repeat part families. Once that protection behavior spreads, the buyer experiences a market full of “no quote” responses, even when the actual machine capacity exists.
The measurable signature
This failure does not require moral diagnosis, it requires instrumentation on the RFQ record and the traveler. Track acknowledgement time from RFQ receipt to a first state change, because a healthy channel produces a quote, a question list tied to the drawing, or a decline reason tied to a constraint. Track the no-response rate, because silence is the cleanest early signal that the inbox stopped behaving like a routing layer. Track quote-to-PO conversion, because low conversion means the system is spending estimator-hours on uncertainty rather than demand, and that shows up later as lead time padding and reduced willingness to engage. If you also track revision churn and PO amendments after traveler release, you will see whether instability in the drawing packet is forcing schedule thrash, fixture rework, and inspection re-planning.
Industry benchmarks vary by process and buyer mix, but a useful anchor is that many shops operate with bid-win rates far below 100%, and a lot of quoting effort goes nowhere. One ERP vendor summarizes “industry studies” as bid-win rates around 30% with quote turnaround times in the three to four day range, which matches what many estimators report as normal in custom fabrication when the packet is not clean. You do not need the perfect benchmark to act, because your own RFQ records will show whether your no-response rate is rising and whether your quote-to-PO conversion is collapsing.
Controls that touch the packet
Controls only work when they attach to a drawing, an RFQ record, a PO, a traveler, or an inspection plan. Require minimum packet fields before routing, including a drawing PDF with revision, tolerance block, material spec, finish spec, quantity, ship date, cert requirement, and a buyer contact who can answer questions about datum intent and acceptance criteria. Require explicit supplier states on the RFQ record, limited to quote, questions, decline, or refer, and require that a decline include a reason tied to a constraint like machine envelope, process capability, cert stack, outside process availability, or inspection burden. Require award closure on the RFQ record when no PO is issued, with a reason code like price, lead time, design change, program cancelled, or internal make, because closure is what prevents repeated unpaid engineering on dead demand.
Do not allow expediting to run ahead of revision control, because that is how schedule boards and travelers lose meaning. Lock the revision letter before an expedite request is accepted, and make the question list part of the packet so inspection planning can be tied to the tolerance block instead of improvised at the CMM. Cap hot travelers based on setup capacity and inspection throughput, because priority always displaces work that was already planned, and a shop can only absorb so many disruptions before it starts producing partial work and missed inspections. These are boring rules, but they are attached to the artifacts that run the floor, which is why they work.
Why this matters
Domestic throughput gets destroyed before the first chip is cut, and it happens through a channel everyone treats as free. Estimator-hours get consumed interpreting drawings that are missing fields, unstable in revision, or unlikely to award, and those hours would otherwise go into fixture design, probe routines, and inspection plans that improve first-pass yield on the traveler. Buyers then experience the downstream symptoms, no-quotes, padded lead times, and “crazy” pricing, and interpret them as a capacity shortage rather than a routing failure. The BBB story is useful because it isolates the mechanism: once every packet is marked urgent, urgency stops being information, and the allocator collapses into noise.
Paper 7 moves from the RFQ inbox to the supply chain that is already there but hard to see, the travelers, cert packets, and inspection reports moving across firms, and the identity and evidence needed to route work without broadcasting uncertainty.