About Derek Lang

Derek Lang is a third-generation wire harness professional with over 30 years of experience in the industry. Throughout his career, he's worked across six different companies ranging from 15-person mom-and-pop shops to global contract manufacturers with 1,000+ employees. He's held roles spanning sales, quoting, quality, manufacturing, and general management, giving him a comprehensive understanding of wire harness operations at every scale.

The Challenge

Across every company Derek worked at, he found the same problem: quoting was being handled the same inefficient way everywhere.

"Every company has a slight variation on the Excel sheet, the master quote sheet, so to speak. But at the end of the day, you're rekeying data into Excel and then making sure you don't make mistakes in your formulas," Derek explained. Even when companies used ERP systems for quoting, the process remained manual. "You're still rekeying all your data into the ERP system. You're relying on costs and inventory that might be outdated."

The manual nature of quoting created serious constraints. In small companies, Derek handled all quoting himself while juggling multiple other responsibilities. In larger companies, it required teams of 20-30 quote engineers just to scale up. Standard quote packages took a week to week and a half. Complex packages with 100+ assemblies could take two and a half weeks. Derek found himself dedicating the first four hours of every day just to quoting, and he couldn't afford interruptions. A single distraction while manually keying data could result in thousands of dollars in pricing errors.

The time pressure was intense. "First guy in usually wins the order," Derek noted. But between the manual work and the difficulty hiring experienced estimators, scaling quoting capacity seemed impossible.

The Search for a Solution

Derek had been looking for a better solution for years. He tried multiple approaches:

• Excel: The most common tool, but completely manual, prone to errors, and not scalable.

• Custom software: One company spent five to seven years developing an in-house solution with dedicated programmers—a massive investment that still required manual data entry.

• Octopart BOM tools: Worked about 60-70% of the way, but data was often days or weeks old and inaccurate. If part numbers weren't exact matches, results were unusable.

• Quoting tools for PCBAs: Derrick tried other quoting tools like Breadboard that were built for PCBAs, which had a slick interface but weren't built for wire harnesses. "I would time myself sometimes, and I'd find I could quote it my old manual way in fifteen minutes, but if I use Breadboard, it took me forty five minutes." The system didn't understand wire harness-specific requirements like units of measure, MOQs, wire styles, or how to handle materials sold by the foot versus by the roll.

"None of those tools really worked. At the end of the day, I found myself just always gravitating back towards Excel or pen and paper," Derek said. He'd become skeptical that a real solution even existed, until Cableteque reached out to him on LinkedIn.

The Solution

Derek was hesitant at first. "It sounded too good to be true," he admitted. During the initial demo, the Cableteque team showed him features that addressed every pain point he'd experienced. His response: "Yeah. Right. Prove it."

What convinced him were two things: seeing it work on his own drawings during the demo, and the lack of a long-term contract. "I can sign up and worst case scenario, if it didn't work or didn't do what I needed it to do, I'm out a month of the subscription. It's not that much."

Derek started testing Cableteque on his old quote packages, even the complex ones that had taken weeks. The software just worked. Key capabilities that stood out were:

• Intelligent BOM extraction: The system learns customer BOM formats and remembers them going forward. "You train it once and then it knows to recognize those BOM formats going forward. Even though they're the same format, it doesn't remember and learn from that on other tools. When I saw that Cableteque just learns the BOM formats and then imports them every time the same way, I'm like, oh my god. That's a huge savings."

• Smart material sourcing: Unlike aggregator tools, Cableteque understands wire harness-specific requirements. It recognizes UL wire styles, handles MOQs correctly, understands the difference between pricing by the foot versus by the roll, and connects directly to supplier systems for accurate, real-time pricing and inventory.

• Streamlined RFQ management: The system generates Excel-based RFQs with unique tracking numbers, so Derek always knows exactly what he's waiting on and for which quote. His purchasing team can see the same information, eliminating duplicate work.

• Labor automation: The newest feature Derek started using automatically counts crimps, strips, and other operations based on BOM data, filling in roughly half the labor estimates before he even clicks to the labor tab.

The onboarding was straightforward. He told our customer success manager Ramzy, "You and I had, what, two phone calls, maybe three. I think we probably had a total of three hours of training, and I'm up and running."

The Results

• 70% reduction in turnaround time: Standard packages dropped from a week to week and a half down to 2-3 days.

• Massive time savings on complex packages: Packages that previously took two and a half weeks now take a day or two.

• No more time blocking: Derek no longer needs to dedicate the first four hours of every day to quoting. "Quoting is now just something you do throughout the day instead of having to dedicate huge blocks of time."

• 5x capacity without hiring: "I could probably do five times as many quotes as we're doing now without needing to hire additional people."

• No more hiring headaches: The need to hire dedicated quoting personnel—already a difficult role to fill—has been completely eliminated.

• Fewer costly errors: Derek can be interrupted without worrying about miskeying data that could cost thousands of dollars.

• Competitive advantage: "I can quote these things faster than any of my competitors that aren't on Cableteque. I kinda feel bad for those guys. It's like, well, you better get on this software and catch up because I'm gonna start taking your business."

• Changed the business approach: "We used to be very kind of surgical and very picky about what we would wanna quote because I don't have the time to do this. And now it's like, heck, I'll quote anything. It's just easy."

Testimonial

"I don't dread getting large quote package requests in my email anymore. It used to be like, ugh, this company reaches out to you and says, "Hey we want you to quote these 150 cables in the next two weeks", and you're like, "I don't want to do that". Now it's like, oh, a package. It's kinda fun to upload a hundred drawings at once and see this massive BOM come out. You definitely take the pain away from handling those big packages.

There's nothing to consider, just do it. I've already talked to a couple other wire harness manufacturers that I have relationships with in the space, even some of my former companies that I've worked for, and I've told them about the software and been like, you guys just needed this ten years ago. Just get on it. Just start using it. This one works because it's built completely differently than all those others. It's built by wire harness people. It's not that expensive compared to the savings you're getting. It really isn't. It's a drop in the bucket when you look at the time savings."

Derek Lang, Wire Harness Industry Veteran (30+ Years Experience)