Cutting IATF-tier supplier lead time by 36%.
How Nova standardized BOQ responses across 28 suppliers — closing the procurement loop in a single workspace.
Section 01
The challenge: 3-week RFQs, 5 known suppliers
Vertex Forge machines and fabricates precision components for industrial OEMs. Every new program starts with a drawing pack — and until 2025, every sourcing event started the same way: two procurement leads emailing the same five known shops, chasing quotes in whatever format came back.
A three-week award cycle was normal. Dual-sourcing a new category meant starting discovery from a blank sheet. When a preferred shop filled capacity mid-program, the backup plan was an inbox search.
The bottleneck
Supplier discovery — not negotiation — consumed most of the cycle. RFQs were only ever as good as the five-name list they were sent to.Section 02
What changed: structured events on live capability data
The team moved its RFQ workflow onto Sourceby in one quarter. Discovery now starts from AI-matched capability — process, material, tolerance band, certifications, capacity — instead of last year's vendor list. Each event carries one drawing pack, one supplier set, and a clarification thread per line item.
- Discovery runs against 200+ verified manufacturers instead of a personal contact list
- Commercial fields are standardized, so quotes land comparable without re-keying
- Clarifications attach to the line they belong to, not to a 40-message email chain
The procurement leads kept their judgment — they still decide who gets the pack. What changed is how the first shortlist is built.
Section 03
Results: −38% cost, 6× faster awards
Across the first year on the platform, Vertex Forge's numbers moved on three axes: cost, speed, and reach.
- −38% sourcing cost on categories opened to matched competition
- 6× faster RFQ cycles — from roughly three weeks to four days on standard events
- 198 suppliers ranked across discovery runs, with 12 added as qualified backups
The savings were not primarily negotiated. They came from seeing capable shops the team had never been introduced to — and from comparing complete quotes side by side instead of reconstructing them from PDFs.
Section 04
What to copy
Teams looking at a similar migration can lift the sequence directly.
- Pick one category you already struggle to dual-source and run discovery on a live RFQ before changing anything else
- Standardize commercial fields first — comparability is what compresses the decision, not the invite count
- Keep verification and KYC decisions human; use the match as a ranking engine, not an award committee
Field note
The wins compounded: every event added suppliers back into Vertex Forge's live sourcing graph, so the second year started from a much wider base than the first.