Two different jobs
A request for quotation (RFQ) asks the distributor to price something, check availability or propose products for a project. A rep builds a quote and sends it, and the customer may or may not buy.
A purchase order places an order for products whose price is already agreed. Nothing is being negotiated: the rep enters the order and the customer waits for the goods.
In the ERP they end differently too. An RFQ becomes a quotation sent to the customer; a purchase order becomes a sales order the customer is waiting on.
Why the same words cause trouble
In Portuguese and Spanish the trap is the word “pedido”. With a price question — “pedido de cotação”, “pedido de orçamento” — it is a quote request. On its own, or as “pedido de compra” or “encomenda”, it is an order.
Orders also arrive in shapes a keyword rule misses: an attached order PDF with a one-line covering note, a forward inside a longer thread, an order confirmation, an EDI notification. If an order document is being passed to you, it is an order, however short the email around it.
The mix is not what you might expect
It is easy to assume quoting is the bulk of the inbox. At Aronlight, the lighting distributor where Ettore runs in production, it was the other way round: in the 30 days to September 24, 2026 Ettore read 614 purchase orders and 166 quote requests — nearly four orders for every quote request, concentrated in one mailbox.
So an automation that only understands quoting leaves most of the inbox untouched — or, worse, pushes orders through a quoting workflow that has nothing to negotiate.
What good automation does with each
It classifies first. Each email is labelled as a quote request or a purchase order before anything else happens, and the label is visible in the queue, so the team sees what kind of work is waiting.
Both then get the same careful reading: the customer is identified, every line is matched to a SKU, and the customer’s own price list is applied. A line the system is unsure of is flagged for a person, not quietly filled in.
They part ways at the end. A quote request becomes a draft quote to send. A purchase order becomes a draft sales order — and a person still reviews it, because a rep may need to adjust a price before it reaches the ERP. In Ettore’s case the order is never confirmed automatically: confirmation stays with the team.