How Bangladesh exporters answer buyer RFQs in a day, not three.

A buyer sends a tech pack and asks for a price. In the garment factories we have sat with, the merchandiser's own work on that RFQ is a little over an hour. The sheet still goes out two or three days later. This is about where those days go, and what it takes to answer the same day.

Where the days go

One merchandiser at a Bangladesh denim and woven group described his quotation-season day to us in September 2026: 100 to 120 emails in, 4 to 6 RFQs, about 30 minutes to read an enquiry and ask the buyer for what is missing, about 45 minutes to build the costing sheet. Then two to three days waiting for internal cost inputs before the quote can go out.

The wait is not idleness. A garment price is six documents made by five departments, in sequence:

1. 01The buyer's artwork or sample and the measurement chart, sometimes a CAD file.
2. 02Industrial engineering returns the SMV, the CM or factory cost, and the efficiency it assumed.
3. 03The CAD room returns fabric and accessory consumption from the marker.
4. 04Sourcing collects supplier quotes for the trims: buttons, rivets, zippers, labels.
5. 05Washing prices the wash.
6. 06The merchandiser builds the quotation in the Excel costing template once every input is in.

In the sample sets we have been shown, a department's "template" is a Word file holding a screenshot of its Excel block, and the wash rate is a photo of a hand-filled form. The inputs arrive as pictures, by email or WhatsApp, when the department gets to them. The merchandiser's forty-five minutes cannot start until the last picture lands.

Two clocks

It helps to keep two clocks. The hands-on clock is the merchandiser's own time: reading, extracting, asking, building the sheet. The waiting clock is everything in between: the request sitting in a department's inbox, the reply sitting in the merchandiser's. For one RFQ the hands-on clock reads about an hour and a quarter. The waiting clock reads days. A tool that only speeds up the hands-on clock leaves the quote where it was.

What changes the waiting clock

Three things, none of them a new system for the departments to learn.

• The AI drafts each department's part first: a first SMV from the operation list, consumption from the marker at the factory's own size ratio, a BOM priced from the supplier quotes the factory already holds, the wash at the plant's last quoted level. The department head opens a task with the draft and the buyer's files side by side, and approves or corrects. Checking a number takes minutes; producing one took the afternoon.
• Every line carries its basis. Established means a past order, a rate card, a supplier quote or a signed price, cited. Derived means arithmetic on established figures, shown. Assumed means a stated norm, flagged with what would settle it. A line with no basis is a question to a person, never a guess that slips into the FOB.
• The sheet builds itself from what the departments return, in the factory's own template if it has one. The merchandiser's job becomes the part that needs her judgement: is this the price we send, and at what margin.

What "the same day" honestly means

The machine part is minutes. The people part is however long the department heads take to check their draft, which in a factory that runs this way is the same day, because the request is a task with the answer attached, not an email asking for an afternoon's work. If an input is missing, the clock stops and the merchandiser is told exactly which input, so the chase is one message rather than a round of calls.

The sheet goes to the merchandiser as a draft to check against her own numbers, and any line more than 10% from the factory's last similar sheet is flagged. What it saves is the department wait. The judgement stays where it was.

Try it on one RFQ