Guides / For Shops

Saying No Well Is a Capability: Picking the Requests Worth Quoting

April 23, 2026

Quoting is not free. Every ceramic RFQ costs engineering time, and on a complex part the review alone can run half a day. The shops that stay profitable are disciplined about which ones they answer.

Here is a scoring approach that takes five minutes per request.

Score the request on five axes

1. Grade fit. Do you run this material every week, occasionally, or never? Occasional work on an unfamiliar grade carries wheel cost you cannot predict and scrap you cannot price.

2. Route fit. Is it a grinding job, a green machining job or a hybrid? If the route is not yours and the subcontract chain is long, the margin is someone else’s.

3. Tolerance fit. Is the tightest callout inside what you hold reliably, or inside what you have hit once? These are different numbers and only one of them belongs on a quote.

4. Envelope and fixturing. Does it fit your machines with a fixture you already have, a fixture you can make cheaply, or a fixture you would be inventing?

5. Commercial reality. Is there a quantity, a date and a named application, or is it an exploratory enquiry with none of the three?

Requests that score well on four or five are worth real effort. Requests that score badly on grade or route are worth a polite decline regardless of how attractive the quantity looks.

The three categories

Quote it. Fits your material, route, tolerance and envelope. Price it properly using the structure in quoting a ceramic part profitably.

Quote it with a change. Fits everything except one feature: a sharp corner, a wall thickness, a tolerance that did not need to be tight. Quote the drawing as sent, then quote the alternative with the change and the saving next to it. This category wins more orders than the first one, because it shows you read the part.

Decline it. Wrong material, wrong tolerance band, wrong envelope, or an enquiry with no quantity and no date. Decline early while it still looks like a considered answer rather than a slow no.

How to decline so the next request still comes

Three sentences is enough:

We are not the right shop for this one. The 0.002 mm flatness across a 200 mm face needs lapping capacity beyond ours, so a quote from us would be optimistic. If the flatness can open to 0.01 mm we would be glad to look again, and either way we can suggest where to ask.

That message costs nothing and does three things: it is honest, it gives the buyer something actionable and it tells them you know the difference between what you hold and what you wish you held. Buyers repeat that to colleagues.

The list of things buyers look for when they qualify a shop is in how to qualify a ceramic machining shop. Question six on that list is literally “what do you decline”, and the shops that answer it fastest are the ones buyers trust.

Track the outcome

Keep a simple record by request type: quoted, won, lost, declined. After a quarter, patterns appear. Most shops find they are winning a narrow band of work and quoting far outside it, which is a fixable problem in intake rather than in pricing.

That is also the information to give anyone sending you requests, including us. The tighter your stated capability, the better the requests get.

Register your shop with your real limits on it, not your aspirational ones. We reply within 24 business hours.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

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