Kyle Moloney
Procurement & Operations | 10+ Years
Kyle has spent over a decade managing procurement and operations for manufacturing companies ranging from small food producers to mid-size contract manufacturers. He now writes about practical inventory management, supply chain, and production operations.
Most small manufacturers add a new supplier the same way: someone gets a good quote over email, checks it against what they're currently paying, and adds the name to the list. No formal evaluation, no paper trail, no comparison against alternatives — just a gut call made under time pressure. For a one-off small buy, that's often fine. For a supplier who's about to become a regular source of a material your production depends on, it's how you end up locked into someone who's slow, inconsistent, or quietly more expensive than the next-best option you never looked at.
Procurement teams at larger companies solve this with a formal process: RFI, RFP, RFQ — three distinct rounds of information-gathering before money changes hands. Most small manufacturers have never run one, not because the idea is bad, but because the formal version is genuinely overkill for a five-person shop evaluating a packaging supplier. The value of the process is real; the ceremony around it usually isn't. So Nstock built a version of it that keeps the value and drops the ceremony.
What RFI, RFP, and RFQ Actually Answer
The three-letter acronyms sound more intimidating than what they actually are — three different questions, asked in increasing order of commitment:
- RFI (Request for Information) — who are you? Company background, certifications, production capacity, years in business, references. This is the "get to know them" stage, useful when you know almost nothing about a prospective supplier.
- RFP (Request for Proposal) — how would you serve us? Lead times, minimum order quantities, payment terms, quality certifications specific to your needs. This is where a supplier tells you how the relationship would actually work day to day.
- RFQ (Request for Quote) — what would it cost? Itemized pricing on the specific materials you need, at the quantities you actually order, with real lead times attached to that quote. This is the number you'd actually compare against what you pay today.
Run in sequence, the three stages narrow from broad to specific: first you learn if a supplier is even a real, credible operation, then how they'd work with you, then what it would cost. That sequence is genuinely useful — it's a lot cheaper to find out a supplier can't meet your certification requirements during an RFI than after you've already gotten a detailed price quote. (See the glossary for the formal definition of each term.)
Why Every Stage Is Optional — On Purpose
Formal procurement processes fail at small companies for one reason: they're built for organizations with dedicated purchasing staff and enough volume to justify weeks of back-and-forth per supplier. A small manufacturer evaluating a new label printer for a $400/month order doesn't need three formal rounds of correspondence. They need enough structure to make a good decision without it becoming a part-time job.
That's why Nstock's vetting pipeline treats RFI, RFP, and RFQ as three independent, always-optional stages rather than a locked sequence. You can:
- Fill in all three, in order, for a supplier you're about to hand a meaningful chunk of your raw material spend.
- Skip straight to RFQ for a low-risk supplier where price is really the only question that matters.
- Fill in a partial RFI — just certifications, nothing else — because that's the one thing you actually needed to confirm.
- Approve a supplier having filled in nothing at all, if you already know enough.
Nothing blocks approval on any stage being complete. The structure is there when a supplier relationship is worth the extra diligence, and invisible when it isn't. A five-person shop and a fifty-person shop can both use the same pipeline without either one feeling like it was built for the other.
From Approved Prospect to a Real Supplier Record, in One Step
Vetting a prospect and adding a supplier used to be two disconnected actions — you'd evaluate someone in email threads or a spreadsheet, then separately go add them as a contact once you'd decided. Nstock closes that gap: approving a vetting record converts the prospect directly into a real supplier, carrying over the contact details you already gathered, and takes you straight into the one question that actually matters next — what does this supplier carry?
That's the materials checklist: every raw material and product you already track, presented as a checklist against the newly approved supplier. Check off what they carry. If they supply something you don't have in your catalog yet, add it right from that same screen — no separate trip through a different part of the app. This is the step that turns "we added a supplier" into "we know what we can actually buy from them," which is the whole point of vetting someone in the first place.
Categories Build Themselves From What You Actually Buy
Once a supplier is checked off against a material, Nstock tags that supplier with the material's category automatically — flour, packaging, chemical, whatever it is. Buy something new from an existing supplier later and the category tag updates the same way, without anyone going back to edit a supplier record by hand. Over time, every supplier's page shows an honest, self-maintaining picture of what they actually supply, built from real purchase history and the materials checklist together, not a description someone typed in once and never revisited.
That answers a question that used to require memory or a spreadsheet hunt: which of our suppliers carry packaging? Which ones supply anything in the "Chemical" category? The categories are just there, visible on the supplier list, because the tagging happens automatically as you do the work you were already doing.
Comparing Cost Across Suppliers Without a Spreadsheet
The other payoff of running a real supplier record instead of a contact list shows up once you've bought the same material from more than one supplier: a price-by-supplier comparison, built directly from your purchase history. No manual price-tracking spreadsheet, no digging through old purchase orders — every material shows landed unit cost by supplier, cheapest first, with the most recent purchase date for each. That's the number you actually want before renewing with an existing supplier or deciding whether a newly vetted one is worth switching to.
Getting Started
If you're evaluating a new supplier right now, start with whichever stage answers the question you're actually unsure about — RFI if you don't know much about them yet, straight to RFQ if price is the only open question. For the full step-by-step walkthrough of running a vetting record from start to finish, see How to Vet a New Supplier. And once a supplier's confirmed and sending you purchase orders regularly, sending POs from your own verified email domain tends to get faster replies than a generic system address.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I have to fill in RFI, RFP, and RFQ in order?
No. Each stage is independently editable at any time — you can jump straight to RFQ, fill in only part of an RFI, or skip stages entirely. The pipeline stage a prospect shows under is just where it's grouped for your own tracking, not a gate on what you can fill in.
What happens to the vetting record after I approve a supplier?
It stays as a reference — the RFI, RFP, and RFQ details you gathered remain attached to that vetting record, and the record links to the new supplier it became. Nothing is deleted; you can look back at why a supplier was approved months later.
Can I vet a supplier I already work with, not just a brand-new prospect?
Yes. There's nothing that requires a vetting record to be a first-time prospect — it works just as well for re-evaluating an existing supplier ahead of a contract renewal or a price renegotiation.
Does vetting cost extra, or is it part of my plan?
Supplier vetting is included alongside supplier management on your existing plan — see current pricing for what's included at each tier.
Start your free trial → — already have an account? Log in and find Supplier Vetting under Suppliers → Supplier Vetting.
— Kyle Moloney, Procurement & Operations