Writing an RFQ a Korean engineer can actually answer

You send an enquiry to a Korean manufacturer and get back a quotation that prices something adjacent to what you wanted, or a list of questions that takes two weeks to resolve. The engineer on the other side is not being difficult. They are filling gaps, and every gap they fill is a guess that later becomes a deviation.

An RFQ is read by an engineer, not a salesperson

In most Korean manufacturing companies, a technical enquiry is routed to engineering for the specification and only then to sales for pricing. The person who determines what is offered is reading your document for design inputs.

That changes what makes an RFQ good. Commercial framing — company background, market position, partnership language — does not help them. Design inputs do.

The practical test is simple: can an engineer who has never spoken to you produce a definite offer from your document alone? If not, the gaps will be filled with their house standard, which is correct for their other customers and not necessarily for you.

Language deserves a sentence of its own. The document will be read in English by someone for whom it is a second language, and possibly summarised into Korean for an internal review. Long sentences with several conditions in them survive that process badly. Short sentences, numbered requirements and a table do not — and the same structure is what makes a specification easy to check against later, so the effort is not spent twice.

What has to be unambiguous

Across product groups the same fields determine whether a quotation is comparable.

The edition of a standard is worth stating explicitly. Two editions can differ in ways that change dimensions or test requirements, and a quotation against the wrong one is not wrong — it is just not what you will accept at inspection.

Separate what is fixed from what is open

The single most useful thing you can add costs one column. Mark each requirement as fixed or as preferred.

A dimension constrained by existing pipework is fixed. A material you named because it is what you usually buy may be open, if the requirement behind it is corrosion resistance. An engineer who knows which is which can propose an alternative that is cheaper, faster, or more readily available.

Without that distinction, everything is treated as fixed. You get a price for exactly what you wrote, including the parts you would happily have changed — and you never hear about the alternative that would have been in stock.

State the application, not only the part

A drawing and a quantity describe an object. They do not describe what it has to do, and duty determines most of the engineering decisions.

Say what the equipment is part of, what it handles, how continuously it runs, and what happens if it fails. That last point in particular changes the offer: a component on a standby unit and one on the critical path justify different construction, different testing, and different lead times.

This also protects you. An engineer who understands the duty will flag a mismatch — a material unsuitable for the medium, a rating too close to the operating point. That warning only comes if they know the application.

Quantities and repeat business belong in the enquiry too. A supplier prices a single piece differently from a piece that is the first of an annual requirement, because setup cost is spread differently. If this is a trial order with a larger volume behind it, saying so changes the price legitimately — and saying nothing means the one-off price is what you get, then have to renegotiate.

Ask for the answer in a usable form

If you intend to compare offers, say how. A supplied table that the supplier fills in produces comparable answers; free-format quotations produce a morning of transcription and several ambiguities.

Useful columns: scope included, scope excluded, lead time as a calendar date, applicable standard and edition, certificate type, inspection included, delivery terms, validity.

Ask explicitly for a deviation list, even a short one. A supplier who returns "full compliance" on a specification they have not reconciled line by line is storing up a problem for both sides, and inviting the list makes it easy for them to be honest instead.

It also helps to state what you already know. If you have a drawing from a previous supply, a photograph of the installation, or measurements taken from an existing unit, include them. Engineers work faster from an existing object than from a description of one, and it reduces the chance that an assumption is made about something you could have confirmed in a sentence.

Give them a way to ask

Questions are good; late questions are expensive. Make the early ones easy.

Name a technical contact, not only a purchasing address. Say by when questions should arrive and by when you will answer. And set a deadline for the quotation that accounts for a round of clarification — an enquiry with a one-week deadline and a three-day question window gets a quotation full of assumptions.

Where the supplier is new to you, a short call at the start is worth more than three emails. It also establishes who on their side actually reads the document.

Keep the commercial terms in the same document

Technical and commercial terms arriving separately produce two quotations that do not add up. Payment terms, warranty, delivery conditions and packaging all affect the price, and a supplier who prices without them will quote their default.

Include them in the RFQ — not as a full contract, but as the handful of points that change the number: delivery terms, payment structure, warranty period, packing requirement, and any documentation you will need at shipment.

If those are non-negotiable, say so. If they are open, say that too. A supplier who knows a term is negotiable may price more sharply against it.

What to reuse next time

Most of an RFQ is stable across enquiries. The service conditions change; the structure does not.

Building a template with the fields above, filled once for each product family, turns a two-hour task into fifteen minutes. More importantly it makes omissions visible: a blank field in a template is obvious, while a missing sentence in free text is not.

Keep the questions you received with the template. The questions a supplier asked last time are the fields your document does not yet answer, and adding them is the cheapest improvement available.

Three sentences about life after delivery

Look back at enquiries that produced non-comparable quotations and one field is consistently empty: what happens after delivery.

Spare parts for the first period, commissioning support, documentation in a particular language, response time for a technical query. These are not extras — they are part of what you are buying, and they carry cost. Left unstated, some suppliers include them and some do not, which is precisely why two prices come back that cannot be compared.

Adding three lines fixes it: what spares you expect quoted, whether commissioning attendance is in scope, and what documentation must accompany the shipment. Each takes a sentence, and each removes a category of post-award discussion that otherwise arrives when your negotiating position is gone. If you have an RFQ you are about to send, we can look at which fields will generate questions — talk to us about sourcing. What the supplier does with the inspection scope is covered under running a FAT.