Ask a shop where they lose the most time on quoting and you'll hear about price negotiation, or comparing quotes, or chasing drawings. It's almost never the real answer.
The real answer is the RFQ that went out on Tuesday and nobody thought about again until the customer asked on the following Thursday.
Silence looks like progress
This is the part that makes it expensive. An RFQ with no reply doesn't generate anything — no email, no notification, no red flag. It sits in exactly the same state as an RFQ being actively worked on by a supplier who's just being thorough.
From your side, both look identical: nothing in the inbox.
So the ones that go quiet stay quiet, and the discovery happens externally — the customer follows up, or someone opens the folder for another reason and notices the date.
Why "I'll remember" doesn't hold
Nobody forgets a single RFQ. They forget one of eleven, in a week when a machine went down.
The load isn't the remembering itself. It's holding an unwritten list of every open request and its age, updating it continuously, alongside your actual job. That list is fine at three RFQs. At fifteen it degrades quietly — and the oldest ones fall out first, which is exactly backwards from what you'd want.
It doesn't degrade evenly across people, either. The person who sent the RFQ remembers it best. If they're out, the memory is out with them.
The two questions that fix most of it
You don't need a process. You need to answer two questions in seconds rather than minutes:
What went out and hasn't come back? Not "which emails did I send" — which requests are still open, sorted by how long they've been waiting.
Which of those is now late? Late means past whatever you asked for. An RFQ you asked back in three days that's on day five is a different situation from one you sent yesterday, and they shouldn't look the same.
If answering either takes scrolling, you don't have the answer — you're rebuilding it each time somebody asks, and you'll only rebuild it when prompted.
Chase in batches, not by whim
Once you can see the late ones, chasing stops being a per-RFQ decision and becomes a fifteen-minute job twice a week. Open the list, see the three that are overdue, send three short follow-ups.
That's a meaningfully different task from "remember to chase things". It has a start and an end, it can be done by whoever is around, and it doesn't require having sent the original.
Two practical notes from watching people do this:
Follow up before it's late, not after. A short "just checking this landed, still need it by Friday" on day two costs you nothing and catches the invisible failure — the one where your email never reached the person who quotes.
Ask for a date, not a quote. "When do you think you'll have a number?" gets an answer from a busy supplier far more often than "any update?", and the answer is useful even when it's next week.
What it's actually costing
Say two RFQs a month go quiet for an extra four days each. That's eight days a month of schedule spent on nothing — not lost to a supplier being slow, but lost to nobody noticing they were slow.
Over a year, that's the kind of number that decides whether you quoted the job in time to win it.
The fix isn't discipline. It's making open RFQs visible enough that going quiet is something you see the same week it happens.