If your team spends hours a day just handling product inquiries or manually cleaning up BOMs, you’re not alone—and it’s killing productivity. This guide shows how manufacturers and suppliers are finally solving the RFQ and BOM chaos—without adding complex systems or hiring more staff. Simple, practical fixes exist. You just need to know where time is leaking and how to plug it.
Let’s be honest: most manufacturing teams aren’t short on demand—they’re short on time. Especially when hours are burned each day just managing inbound RFQs and cleaning up messy BOMs from email. These tasks feel normal, even necessary. But they’re quietly eroding sales momentum, customer response times, and team bandwidth. You don’t need more people or a fancy platform. You need a smarter way to handle the work that’s already coming in.
But first off, what are RFQs and BOMs for manufacturing businesses?
RFQs (Request for Quotes) are formal inquiries a business receives from potential customers asking, “How much will it cost to make or supply this product or part?” It’s basically a customer asking for a price estimate before placing an order. For example, a company might send an RFQ to a metal fabrication shop requesting a quote to produce 1,000 steel brackets with specific dimensions and finishes.
BOMs (Bill of Materials) are detailed lists that show all the components, parts, and raw materials needed to build a product. They include quantities, part numbers, and sometimes specifications. For example, a BOM for an electric motor might list the shaft, bearings, coils, housing, screws, and wiring with exact quantities and part IDs. Manufacturers use BOMs to know exactly what materials to buy and assemble.
In practice, RFQs often come with BOMs attached. The buyer sends the BOM so the manufacturer can understand exactly what parts and quantities they need to price and produce. Handling these requests efficiently is crucial for quick, accurate quoting and production planning.
Why You’re Drowning in RFQs and BOMs—and Don’t Realize It
Most businesses think of RFQ handling as an admin task—open the email, grab the files, maybe forward to someone else, maybe copy-paste into a spreadsheet. But when you zoom out, it’s clear how much this “small” task adds up. Let’s say you get 10–15 inbound RFQs per day. If each one takes 10–20 minutes to read, organize, and route, you’re losing 2–5 hours daily. Over a month, that’s a full-time person—just to manage the intake of quotes, not even the quoting itself.
What’s worse, these RFQs often arrive unstructured: sometimes they’re emails with vague descriptions, sometimes they include PDFs, ZIP files, screenshots, Excel spreadsheets with no standard format. So your team spends extra time just trying to understand what the buyer wants before you can even respond. That time doesn’t show up on a timesheet, but it drags down your speed and responsiveness—and the customer can feel it.
Here’s how this plays out for a real business: A fabrication shop that does metal frames and brackets was getting about 30 inbound RFQs a week via email. Every single one went to the owner’s inbox. From there, he manually forwarded each one to the estimator, who had to hunt for missing part specs or sort through 3–4 attachments per request. It wasn’t unusual for some to get missed entirely. When they finally tracked it, they realized they were spending nearly 12 hours a week just processing quote requests—and losing 1 in 4 because they didn’t respond quickly enough.
It’s not a sales problem. It’s a signal problem. You’re likely already getting enough leads and quote opportunities—just losing momentum because the front end of your quoting process is too manual, too messy, and too dependent on one or two people triaging the chaos.
The Cost of Manual BOM Cleanup: It’s Not Just a Headache, It’s a Margin Killer
The second time sink lives inside the BOMs you receive. On the surface, parsing a bill of materials just means pulling the relevant part numbers, quantities, and specs into your own format so your team can quote or build it. In practice, though, it’s a data cleanup nightmare. Customers send you BOMs in all kinds of formats: Excel with merged cells, PDFs with notes scribbled in the margins, or plain-text files that mix SKUs with descriptions, categories, and footnotes.
This kind of manual cleanup isn’t just frustrating—it leads directly to lost time, incorrect quotes, or jobs that go sideways in production because someone missed a spec buried in a note. Even if you have an experienced estimator handling it, that person’s time is too valuable to be spent copying, pasting, and cleaning up cell formatting all day.
Let’s look at a real-world example. A small electrical components distributor receives large BOMs from their OEM customers—some with over 500 line items. Their inside sales team used to spend hours cleaning up each file: deleting empty rows, reformatting columns, fixing typos, cross-checking part numbers. In one case, they missed a line item because it was embedded inside a comment field. That single oversight led to underquoting the job by 7%, wiping out most of the margin when they won it.
And even when errors don’t happen, the time investment is huge. That same team spent 3 to 4 hours per BOM just to get it into quoting shape. Across 10 big RFQs a month, they were losing over 30 hours—nearly an entire week—on cleanup work that could have been automated or avoided.
What’s Actually Working: Smart Fixes Real Businesses Are Using Right Now
The good news is you don’t need to throw a new software system at this problem. You just need to make the process easier for your team to handle—consistently. That starts with structuring how quote requests come in.
One solution that works well: set up a dedicated RFQ intake form on your website. Keep it simple—just a few required fields like company name, contact info, part type, quantities, and a file upload field. This creates structure before the request hits your inbox. You can also have multiple form versions depending on product category, if needed. Once submitted, the form sends the inquiry to a shared inbox or CRM board where your team can triage quickly.
In parallel, move away from quote requests going to personal inboxes. Create a shared email (e.g., quotes@ or rfq@) that’s monitored daily, and use simple rules in Gmail or Outlook to auto-label or forward based on keywords like “quote,” “BOM,” or part names. It’s not fancy, but it works—and it means fewer things slip through the cracks.
For BOM cleanup, start testing AI-powered parsing tools. You don’t need to jump into something enterprise-grade. Even lightweight tools like Docparser or Veryfi can extract tables and part numbers from PDFs or Excel files and dump them into a clean spreadsheet format. One machine shop tried this on their top 5 customers’ BOMs and found that 3 out of 5 parsed perfectly. For the other 2, it still cut the manual work in half.
And don’t underestimate how much clarity helps. Some teams now assign a dedicated admin—not an estimator—to do first-pass triage. Their job is just to open RFQs, run the BOMs through the parser, check for completeness, and prep the file before the quoting expert touches it. This structure has saved hours per week and allowed sales teams to respond faster, with cleaner, more accurate quotes.
What to Watch Out For: Avoid These Common Traps That Waste Time and Money
As you start improving how you handle RFQs and BOMs, it’s easy to fall into some traps that actually make things worse. One big mistake is rushing into expensive software without first fixing your intake and process clarity. Buying complex platforms before knowing exactly where time is leaking often leads to tools that get underused or create new headaches.
Another pitfall is ignoring your team’s input. If your quoting or estimating staff aren’t involved in choosing or testing new workflows, the fixes won’t stick. They know best where the bottlenecks and frustrations live.
Also, don’t assume that sheer volume of RFQs is the core problem. More often, it’s the workflow—how the requests move through your team, who owns what step, and whether communication is clear. Finally, don’t hand off RFQ intake to the wrong people without clear roles. You need someone who can triage and prepare requests efficiently, but also knows when to escalate details to engineering or sales.
Fixing RFQ and BOM headaches isn’t about a silver bullet. It’s about clear ownership, better structure, and smart use of simple automation that fits your team’s way of working.
Why Small Changes Here Lead to Big Wins Downstream
The ripple effect of cleaning up your RFQ and BOM processes is huge. Faster, clearer intake means your team quotes quicker, customers get answers sooner, and your win rates improve. Quoting errors drop because BOMs are cleaner, reducing costly surprises during production.
You’ll also find your sales and engineering teams less stressed. When admin chaos fades, your top talent focuses on what really matters: designing solutions, improving products, and closing deals.
Think about it like tuning a machine. Fix the messy input, and the whole operation hums better.
How to Start: 3 Moves You Can Make This Week That Save Hours a Day
Most of these fixes don’t require budget—just a few hours to set up. Start by choosing one:
First, centralize all RFQs in a shared inbox and set an auto-response so senders know their request was received. This instantly reduces follow-up emails and missed opportunities.
Second, create a simple quote intake form and link to it from your email footer or website. It helps guide buyers and pre-filters junk inquiries.
Third, test a BOM parser on your most common file types. Take 3 BOMs from the past month, run them through a free trial, and see how well they clean up. Even partial automation can save you hours.
You don’t need to fix everything overnight. But these small steps unlock real time—and that time goes back into quoting faster, serving customers better, and closing more work without burning out your team.
3 Practical Takeaways You Can Use Tomorrow
1. Stop letting RFQs land in personal inboxes. Use a shared email with simple triage rules to route and track them.
2. Test AI-based BOM parsers on your real files. Even a 50% success rate can cut your cleanup time in half.
3. Assign a non-technical person to handle first-pass quote intake. This frees up your estimators and engineers for higher-value work.
Ready to save 8–10 hours a week without adding headcount? Start where the chaos begins: your inbox. Fix that, and everything downstream gets easier.
Top 5 FAQs About Handling RFQs and BOM Parsing
1. How can I standardize quote requests without losing potential leads?
A simple online RFQ form with just key fields lets you gather consistent info while still being easy for customers to use. Keep the form short, and provide an email option for unique cases.
2. Will AI parsing tools handle all my BOM formats?
Not all formats, but many common ones. Test tools on your actual files. You’ll often find they handle 60-80% of your BOMs well enough to save serious time.
3. Who should own the RFQ intake process?
Someone organized with a solid understanding of your products and quoting needs—but not necessarily a senior engineer. Often an admin or inside sales person works best after quick training.
4. Can I keep using email instead of forms?
Email is fine but only if it’s centralized in a shared inbox with rules and clear ownership. Otherwise, requests get lost or delayed.
5. How do I convince my team to change processes?
Start small, show early wins with time saved, and get their input. When they see the workload easing, they’ll be more open to new methods.
Ready to reclaim hours in your week? Start with fixing your RFQ intake and BOM cleanup workflows today. These small, practical steps will free your team from daily chaos, letting you focus on growing your business—not just managing emails. The faster you act, the sooner you’ll see the difference in speed, accuracy, and customer satisfaction. Let’s make your quoting process work for you—not against you.