RFQ Process Guide: From Brief to Awarded Supplier

What is an RFQ?

A Request for Quotation (RFQ) is a structured procurement document used to invite qualified suppliers to submit price quotes for a clearly specified product or service. Unlike an RFP, which evaluates approach and capability, an RFQ assumes the requirement is well understood and focuses on commercial terms: unit price, delivery, payment terms, warranty, and total cost of ownership.

The RFQ lifecycle, step by step

1. 1. Define requirements. Capture exact specifications, quantities, target delivery window, applicable standards, and any service-level expectations. Ambiguity here is the single largest source of inflated quotes.
2. 2. Shortlist suppliers. Use prior performance data, certifications (ISO, GDPR, EU AI Act readiness), and geographic constraints to build a 3–8 supplier shortlist.
3. 3. Issue the RFQ. Send identical, structured documents with a clear submission deadline and a single point of contact for clarifications.
4. 4. Collect & normalize quotes. Convert every quote to a comparable basis: currency, incoterms, payment timing, included/excluded freight and taxes.
5. 5. Compute total cost of ownership. Add shipping, duties, payment-terms cost of capital, risk premium for unreliable suppliers, and hidden setup fees.
6. 6. Score & rank. Combine TCO, delivery confidence, and commercial risk into a single weighted score with an executive-ready rationale.
7. 7. Negotiate & award. Use the ranked output to drive a focused negotiation — opening position, fallback, and a documented red line per supplier.

Where AI changes the work

Steps 4 to 6 — normalization, TCO computation, and ranking — are the slowest, most error-prone parts of the process. They typically consume ~80% of a sourcing lead's time per RFQ and are done in spreadsheets that quietly diverge from reality.

Corvendis ingests supplier PDFs and DOCX files, extracts the commercial terms, computes a normalized TCO per supplier, and produces a ranked recommendation with a confidence score — in roughly two minutes. The sourcing lead keeps the strategic judgement; the comparison disappears.

How to evaluate AI vendors for procurement

• Does it produce a deterministic, auditable comparison — not just a chat summary?
• Can it export the analysis to PDF and Excel for your stakeholders and ERP?
• Does it flag compliance risk (GDPR, EU AI Act, Late Payment Directive) by default?
• Is your supplier data isolated per workspace, with EU data residency where required?
• Is pricing predictable per-seat, not per-document or per-token?