The Best Drill Bit Supplier Is the One That Says 'We Don't Make That'

The best drill bit supplier on my list is the one that turned down part of my RFQ

I'm the office administrator for a 130-person drilling services company. We run three crews and a small fab shop, and I've managed the purchasing desk since 2021 — roughly $850,000 a year spread across nine vendors. Some of that is copier paper and shop gloves. Most of it is drill bits.

Here's my position, and I'll state it without hedging: a drill bit supplier who never says no is a supplier I don't trust. If every RFQ comes back with "yes, we can do that," I assume I'm talking to a desk, not a shop. And I've been burned enough times to mean that literally, not as a figure of speech.

The conventional wisdom in procurement is that consolidation is always safer — fewer relationships, fewer invoices, fewer things to track. My experience after four years and something like 300 orders suggests the opposite. The narrow vendors are the ones I trust with the money.

Argument one: a catalogue that lists everything tells you nothing

In early 2022 I was sourcing bits for a job that needed a specific crown profile, and I started collecting quotes from drill bit manufacturers I hadn't worked with. One of them had a homepage banner calling themselves a diamond drill bit manufacturer, and beneath it a product menu that listed PDC bits, surface-set, impregnated, tapered, reverse circulation, HDD tooling, plus a "custom solutions" tab.

I should have asked a harder question. Instead I did what a busy person does and placed a small trial order.

What arrived didn't match the drawing. I said "same as last time." They heard "whatever fits the box." The crown profile was close enough to look right on a photo and wrong enough that my crews told me about it on the second shift. We shipped them back, paid the freight ourselves, and lost two weeks.

That was a communication failure on my end as much as theirs. But it only happened because I never established what they actually manufactured versus what they resold. They were a full-line supplier (i.e., a company that lists every bit type and produces none of them in-house), and nothing on their site said so.

We didn't have a formal drawing-verification step at the time. The third time a mismatch like that landed on my desk, I built a one-page spec sheet — drawing number, revision letter, crown profile, matrix or surface-set, diameter tolerance, and a signature line. I really should have done it after the first time.

Argument two: the refusal that won our business

In our 2024 vendor consolidation project I cut our active list from fourteen suppliers down to nine. Part of that was administrative — fourteen vendors meant fourteen sets of invoices, W-9s, and certificate renewals, and I was the only person processing them.

During that review I sent the same RFQ package to a mining drill bit manufacturers outfit we'd used twice for a small order, and to a larger one-stop operation that quoted our full list promptly.

The mining shop quoted about two-thirds of the list. The rest came back with a note:

"We don't do the small-diameter tapered work — it's not our strength. Two shops do it well, and here are their names."

That email is probably the reason they now hold most of our bit spend. Not because they were cheaper. Because I finally knew exactly what I was buying from them and what I wasn't.

When I put the two quotes side by side on identical line items — same drawings, same tolerances, same quantities, Q2 2024 — the one-stop came in 14% to 19% higher, and the drawing revisions took three extra weeks of back-and-forth. I'd call that a convenience premium, and I'd rather pay for capability.

Argument three: sourcing and manufacturing are different jobs

This is where I part ways with the "just find one good partner for everything" advice.

I don't need one company to be excellent at both making bits and matching buyers to the right shop. I need whoever I'm buying from to be clear about which layer they sit on. A drill bit manufacturer should be able to tell me who cuts the bit, which drawing revision they're working from, and what operations happen in their own building. A sourcing partner should be able to tell me which shops they use, why those shops, and what happens when one slips a date.

The FTC's advertising guidance requires that business claims be truthful, not misleading, and substantiated with evidence. That standard applies to a spec sheet as much as to a billboard. If a supplier lists ISO 9001 or API certification, verify it with the issuing registrar instead of trusting the PDF on the website. (Note to self: add that check to the new-vendor form — I keep meaning to and keep not doing it.)

When we rebuilt our vendor list, drill bit suppliers sourcing came down to one filter: does this company make the bit, or match me to someone who does? Both answers are fine. "Both, depending" is not an answer.

But isn't managing nine vendors more work than managing three?

Yes. That's the honest answer, and I won't pretend otherwise. More relationships means more W-9s, more certificate expirations, more invoice formats that don't match what finance expects.

But work per vendor isn't the same thing as work overall. I process 60 to 80 orders a year. When each of the nine does a narrow, defined thing, I know what to check and what I can skip — I don't re-verify a shop's core product every single time. The vendor that "does everything" is the one where I have to verify everything, every time, because I have no baseline to compare against.

There's also a paperwork angle people underestimate. In 2022 we used a supplier who could not put a drawing number on an invoice. Finance rejected the expense report, and I ate $2,400 out of the department budget to make it go away. Now I verify invoicing capability before the first purchase order. It sounds trivial. It isn't.

Where one-stop buying genuinely wins: emergency quantities, one-off sample orders, and odd sizes where the tooling cost doesn't justify opening a second relationship. I still do that a few times a year. But I don't build a repeat production line on it, and I don't assume the price I get there reflects the market.

What I actually ask now, before the first PO

Two questions, every time:

• What don't you make?
• Who do you send people to when the answer is "we don't"?

The suppliers who answer both without pausing are the ones I keep. In my opinion, that's a better reliability signal than any catalogue photo, any trade show booth, and any claim on a homepage.

Specialty isn't a weakness in a supplier. It's the only thing that makes their "yes" mean anything. A shop that knows its limits will tell you when a job is wrong for them — which means when they say a job is right for them, you can believe it.