I started in this industry the way most people do. Quoting wire harnesses. I learned from someone who already knew how to do it by watching them read a drawing and doing much of the work by hand, because that was just how it was done.
You get fast at it. You build shortcuts. You know where part numbers tend to live on different customers' drawings, which callouts to trust and which ones to double-check. It starts to feel like expertise because, in a way, it is.
But here's what I kept coming back to: the time. BOM creation alone takes 30 to 45 minutes on a straightforward assembly. Reading the drawing, transcribing every part number, wire length, connector, and quantity into a spreadsheet. Two hours or more when there's no BOM table on the print. Then sourcing. Then labor. By the time a quote goes out the door, a day or more has disappeared, and your best people have spent most of it on work that never needed to be theirs.
Experiencing that firsthand, across years of quoting and talking to shops across the industry, is why I started Cableteque. I knew the process could be faster. I just needed to build the thing that made it so.
What I didn't anticipate was how much AI would accelerate what's now possible.
What we just launched
We've been building toward this for a while, and I'm genuinely excited to talk about it: Cableteque AI.
It's not a chatbot bolted onto a quoting tool. It's AI trained specifically on wire harness drawings, reading BOMs, connector tables, wire lists, notes, and inline callouts, then building a structured, sourceable BOM in minutes. It knows what's there, flags what's missing, and surfaces discrepancies before your estimator has typed a single thing. From there, it sources materials in real time against your existing distributor relationships, automatically applies your negotiated pricing, and pre-populates labor estimates using your own standards.
A drawing goes in. A quote comes out. The whole sequence of BOM creation, sourcing, and labor, without leaving the platform.
BOM creation that used to take 30 to 45 minutes now takes 2 to 5. Sourcing that used to mean chasing distributors for days happens automatically. Labor that used to be built from zero gets pre-populated from the BOM.
Why this moment matters
A recent WHMA member survey found that 74% of wire harness manufacturers describe their quoting process as manual and too slow for customer expectations. 57% cite BOM completeness as one of their top operational challenges. Those numbers don't surprise me. What surprises me is how long the industry has accepted them as the cost of doing business.
The shops moving fastest right now aren't just the ones with the best estimators. They're the ones who've stopped asking their best estimators to spend half their day on transcription and manual lookups. AI handles the groundwork. Your people handle the judgment.
That's the shift. And for shops that make it, the compounding effect on quote volume, turnaround time, and win rate is significant.
See it in action
We recently hosted a live walkthrough of Cableteque AI BOM creation, showing exactly what happens from drawing upload to finished BOM on real customer prints. No slides, no scripted demo. Just the tool working on actual drawings.
The recording is available now. If you want to see it before you decide whether it's worth a conversation, that's the right place to start.