How should a shop handle a repeat customer RFQ?

A repeat RFQ is the most favourable estimating situation a shop ever gets and is routinely handled as though it were new work. The shop has made the part, knows what the setup actually took rather than what was estimated, knows where the scrap came from, and knows what the inspection required. None of that is on the drawing and all of it is in the job record — and quoting from the drawing rather than from the record discards it.

Pricing from the previous actual cost rather than the previous quote is the specific discipline, and the distinction matters. The prior quote reflects what was estimated; the job record reflects what happened. Where the two differ — and on a first-run part they usually do — the estimate is the less reliable of the two, and repeating it repeats the error into every subsequent order of the same part.

The risk on repeat work is the change nobody mentioned. A revised drawing with a tightened tolerance, a different quantity that changes the economics of the setup, a material substitution, a new inspection requirement, a customer-side revision that reached purchasing and not you. Each turns a job you have priced from history into one you have not, and none of them is necessarily flagged. A short explicit checklist against the previous order — revision, quantity, material, tolerance, finish, inspection — takes a minute and is what makes historical pricing safe.

Speed is where the relationship value sits. A repeat customer sending an RFQ for a part you have made is expecting a straightforward answer, and a shop that returns it the same day on the strength of its own records is demonstrating something a competitor quoting from scratch cannot. That is also the shop's defence against a buyer testing the market: the incumbent's advantage is knowing the job, and it only shows if the quote arrives promptly.

Material cost is the term that most often needs updating and the one most often carried forward unchanged. Where prices have moved since the last order, repeating the old figure quotes last year's cost at this year's speed. The safe arrangement is a maintained material rate table with a visible last-updated date, applied to historical labour and setup — which keeps the part of the history that is stable and refreshes the part that is not.

One further use of the record: repeat volume by part tells the shop which work is genuinely recurring, and that is the input to the questions about capacity, tooling and whether a configurator would pay. A shop that quotes repeats from scratch usually cannot answer how much of its RFQ volume is repeat work at all.