Do other industries get RFQs as emailed tables too?

The short answer: yes. Across industrial distribution, email is where most RFQs arrive, and the phone is mostly for urgent or single-item requests. In the thread, the poster added that the routine is always the same: take the list from the email, clean it up and import it into the system. An aerospace distributor replied with the same problem at a larger scale, with RFQs of hundreds or more than a thousand part numbers that often weren’t in a structured table at all, and said their team had moved to an AI tool to stop doing it by hand.

How RFQs usually arrive, by industry

• Electronic components: Spreadsheets and BOM-style tables by email: part number, manufacturer, quantity, target date.
• Electrical supply: Contractor material lists as PDFs or pasted into the email body, often with descriptions instead of part numbers.
• MRO and industrial: Short emails and attachments mixing customer codes, worn-off part numbers and plain descriptions.
• Bearings and power transmission: Lists of interchangeable part numbers from several brands, where suffixes change the item.

The format changes; the work doesn’t. Someone has to get every line out of the email, PDF or spreadsheet, match it to an item you sell, and check the unit and quantity before anyone can price it.

Why “clean it and import it” takes so long

• Every customer’s table is different: column names, order, merged cells and notes in the middle of the list.
• Part numbers aren’t yours: customer codes, competitor numbers and manufacturer numbers with or without suffixes.
• Units hide errors: each versus box, feet versus reels, pack sizes that change the quantity.
• Not everything is a table: lists pasted into the email body, or PDFs exported from another system.

At 20 RFQs a day, even ten minutes of cleanup each is more than three hours of a rep’s day spent before any pricing starts.

What to automate, and what to keep

Automate the reading and the matching. Keep the decisions: the price, the substitute, the answer to the customer. That split is how RFQ Inbox works. Forward or upload the RFQ as a PDF, Excel, CSV or pasted email; it extracts every line, matches each one to your own catalog with a score and the evidence behind it, and flags what it can’t match or where units disagree. Your team reviews and exports a clean CSV or XLSX to import into the ERP you already use.

See how it works, or read the guide to RFQ automation software for distributors.

If you’re on the buying side

The aerospace reply in the thread was about sending large part-number lists out to many suppliers. That is a different job, handled by procurement and sourcing tools. We compare both sides in the best RFQ software by use case.

We summarized a public Reddit thread in our own words and link to it above. We are not affiliated with Reddit or with anyone in the thread.