How to Write a Bag Inspection Checklist Into Your RFQ

The moment to set inspection terms is the moment nobody has committed to anything. Once a price has been agreed, every additional requirement becomes a concession somebody has to grant, and each concession costs goodwill that the programme will need later for something that actually matters.

Yet the great majority of enquiries mention inspection in a single line, or not at all. "Third-party inspection required" is typical. It tells the recipient nothing about what will be counted, what the tolerance is, what happens if it fails, or who pays — and every one of those questions will otherwise be settled later, when the other side is in a stronger position.

Why Do Inspection Terms Belong in the Enquiry Rather Than Later?

Because a price is a function of the specification. Two suppliers quoting the same construction against different realities are not quoting comparable prices — one has priced risk properly and the other has not included it. The difference does not show in the quotation; it shows in what happens when a lot comes close to the line.

Cost comes into it too, though it is the smaller argument. At enquiry stage the specification is still being discussed, so changes take a day. Later they take weeks and each one arrives carrying a request for something in return.

There is a second reason, quieter and stronger. An enquiry sets the terms of the conversation that follows. A supplier who has read a three-line inspection block at quotation stage has already accepted it, and later clauses feel like implementation rather than imposition.

What Exactly Belongs in the Enquiry?

Eight items, in a single block, written once and reused for every style in the programme. They fit comfortably on a page and each one prevents a specific category of argument.

How Specific Does the Enquiry Need to Be?

Specific enough that two people reading it separately would arrange the same inspection. That is the real test, and it is stricter than it sounds. "Inspect before shipment" fails it immediately; "sample fifty units at Level II and reject on the fourth major" passes.

A useful test before sending: hand the enquiry to somebody who has never made this product and ask them what inspection they would arrange from it alone. If the answer involves a question, the document needs another line.

Should You Send Your Own Checklist or Ask for Theirs?

Send yours. A received checklist tells you what that supplier already does well, which is real information, but it is their definition of the product rather than yours. Take theirs as input, then attach your own with your tolerances and your classes.

Where suppliers resist your list, ask what specifically is difficult rather than assuming bad faith. Sometimes the objection is genuine: a tolerance impossible to hold on that equipment, or a test that requires apparatus nobody within reachable distance owns. Those are worth hearing, and agreeing another approach is legitimate. Resistance that is not specific is worth investigating.

There is also a category of objection worth accepting quickly: a tolerance that is genuinely tighter than the equipment can hold. Insisting on it does not improve the product; it simply moves the discussion to the day the first lot fails for a reason everybody could have foreseen. Ask what can be held, verify it against a trial, and then write that number down.

Where the objection concerns cost rather than capability, decide whether the requirement is genuinely needed. Enquiries accumulate clauses from previous programmes, and some survive long after the thing that justified them has gone. Reviewing once before sending is a few minutes spent against problems that take weeks to arrive.

How Do You Price Inspection Cost Into the Enquiry?

Say who pays and for what, in the same currency as everything else people will argue about. A third-party visit is normally charged by the man-day, and it is customary for the party who required the visit to bear it. Where a failed lot is re-presented, the second visit usually follows the responsibility for the failure rather than the original arrangement.

Ask for the cost of any tests you require to be shown separately. Bundled testing looks attractive until you want to change one item, at which point nobody can price the change. Itemised testing suites look trivial to quote and are easy to adjust later.

What Should the Enquiry Say About Samples and Approval?

The same principle applies one stage earlier. Sampling takes 6-10 working days from a signed-off tech pack, and that period is when the specification gets tested by reality — the tool that cannot reach a seam, the tolerance that produces visible rejections, the construction that behaves differently made at scale. Put the approval process in the enquiry so everybody knows what "signed off" means before it is needed.

Say who approves, how many rounds of sampling are included, what happens to the cost beyond that number, and whether the approved units are returned. State that bulk does not begin until approval is written rather than verbal, and state what bulk timing follows from it — 35-50 days from written approval rather than from the date somebody said something encouraging in a meeting.

Require the approved sample to be retained and labelled, and name what happens if it is lost. A missing reference sample is not a small inconvenience; it removes the only physical definition of the product that everybody agreed to, and everything after it becomes harder than it should be.

How Do You Compare Two Quotations That Answer Differently?

Lay them against your own clause rather than against each other. Score each answer as accepted, qualified or silent, and you immediately see which supplier engaged the block and which merely acknowledged it. Two quotations can appear similar in price and be entirely different in what has been accepted.

Weight the qualifications. "We can hold ±1.0 cm on this seam and not less" is a considered answer from somebody who read it. "Accepted as standard practice" is not an answer at all, and it tends to be resolved later in whichever direction is currently favourable to whoever wrote it.

Do the arithmetic on the inspection cost before deciding. Where one quotation includes the visits and the other does not, the apparent price difference may vanish or reverse once the cost of what you actually require is added. Comparing prices without adding inspection, testing and any travel is the most common way to pick the wrong supplier on a close call.

What Should the Quotation Actually Return?

Beyond price and timing, three things that will save you later: confirmation that each clause in the inspection block is accepted, named substitutes for any clause that is not, and identification of the laboratory that will produce each test report. A quotation that simply says "accepted" without engaging the second and third has usually not been read by anybody technical.

Ask how long the offer stands and what happens to the inspection terms if the quantity changes. A lot size moving across a code letter boundary changes the sample size, so a much larger or smaller order changes what the visit actually does. Better to agree that now than to discover it at booking.

What Changes Between the Enquiry, the Order and the Invoice?

Ideally nothing, and that is the point of putting it in early. In practice the sequence is enquiry → proforma invoice → purchase order → booking, and each handover is an opportunity for a clause to disappear quietly.

Guard it mechanically: carry the inspection block verbatim into every document in the chain, reference the same annex letters, and never summarise. A summary is a new document with its own interpretation, which is precisely what you were avoiding.

Where something genuinely must change — a tolerance relaxed after a trial, or a level adjusted after experience — revise the annex and bump the version. Everyone works from version 3 rather than from an email describing a change to version 2.

Do not negotiate it into the email trail. Revisions agreed in correspondence end up half-applied: somebody remembers the conversation and somebody remembers the document, and they are not the same people.

What Should Be Attached to the Enquiry?

The documents that make the rest interpretable. Most programmes send enough to be quoted but not enough to be made, and inspection suffers first because it depends on every other definition being settled.

Should the Enquiry State What Happens to Rejected Units?

Almost nobody does, and then everybody is surprised. Units removed during a sort, units from a lot that was rejected outright, and replacement units all need a destination before the situation arises. Otherwise the answer gets improvised under pressure by whoever happens to be standing there.

Cover four things: whether rejected units are returned, re-presented, repaired or destroyed; who arranges and bears that movement; when title in those units changes hands; and how their disposal is evidenced where it must be. The last matters more than it sounds — several markets require documented destruction for goods bearing a brand that cannot be released.

Replacements need the same treatment as the original lot. Say whether they are inspected again and at whose cost, whether the clock restarts on the delivery commitment, and what happens to the shipping booking that was made for the units that did not ship.

How Do You Keep the Checklist Version Controlled?

Number it, date it, and say which order it applies to on every page. Then reference it by number in each booking. Fewer than half of programmes do this, and every one of them eventually runs a visit against a version nobody can identify.

Keep an index: which version applied to which order. It takes one line per order and it is the difference between reconstructing an argument from memory and reading a document.

What Do You Do When Nobody Answers the Clause?

Treat silence as information. A supplier who acknowledges the price and timing but not the inspection block has read neither the block nor the significance of it. Ask once, directly, and see what comes back — the reply tells you a great deal about how the order will be managed.

Where the answer is an outright refusal, decide quickly. It may be legitimate commercial grounds, but it also means every close call later will be argued rather than resolved. That is a real cost, and it belongs in the comparison rather than being discovered during the first failed lot.

Does This Belong in the Enquiry or in the Order?

Both, and in that order. The enquiry establishes it, the order binds it, and the booking enacts it. Skipping the first means negotiating it at the second, which is the weaker position by definition — everything else has already been agreed and there is nothing left to trade.

Put it plainly into the terms as well: that the lot is not released until inspection passes and the required documents are received. That single sentence is what converts the clauses from intentions into something with commercial consequence.

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