How Electro-Prep Onboarded in Days and Now Clears 30-40 RFQs a Week

Introduction

Kaylee Grodsky joined Electro-Prep, Inc. about a year ago as a buyer, with no prior wire harness industry experience. Alongside procuring material, she now spends much of her time supporting the sales team by sourcing material costs for custom quotes, work that used to depend entirely on manual, trial-and-error research.

The Challenge

Learning a new industry on top of a manual process

Before Cableteque, Electro-Prep's team quoted using Excel sheets built around existing patterns, entering material data by hand and uploading BOMs and drawings separately. For Kaylee, new to wire harnesses, that meant learning the fundamentals of sourcing while also trying to quote quickly.

"I had no idea what I was looking for, and looking at a lot of the time, I had to learn from scratch," she said. Gaps in her own knowledge, like knowing when a job needed special tooling or required lengths, could stretch a single quote out over several days.

That slowness compounded into a backlog. One RFQ in particular sat stalled for weeks while Kaylee waited on answers she couldn't get quickly enough through manual outreach; she estimates that quote alone would have taken about a month to finish under the old process.

The Solution

An AI assistant built into the quoting workflow

Electro-Prep adopted the Cableteque Quoting Platform, which reads BOMs and drawings, surfaces AI-generated clarifying questions, and shows which vendors already have a part in stock, with direct links through to each vendor's site for pricing.

Onboarding was originally scoped at 60 days; Electro-Prep's leadership pushed to compress it to a month, and Kaylee's team was working independently well before that. She completed her onboarding checklist in about two days and needed roughly a morning of practice uploading BOMs and drawings before she felt comfortable.

The moment it clicked, she said, came on her second upload: after she asked whether she'd missed anything, the AI confirmed nothing was outstanding. "I had to write back, 'thank you,' because I appreciated it so much."

Rolling the platform out to the rest of her team took the same approach: short, one-on-one sessions rather than formal training. In one example, Kaylee spent about 30 minutes walking a colleague through the platform step by step, and by the end of that session the colleague uploaded a BOM independently. Kaylee says the pattern has held across the team, including members less comfortable with computers generally, without the frustration a new system might usually cause.

The Results

A stalled RFQ resolved in one sitting

The clearest impact was on the stalled RFQ Kaylee had been stuck on, a quote she estimates would have taken about a month under the old manual process. She uploaded it to Cableteque and within seconds could see which vendors already had the part in stock, then clicked straight through to each vendor's site from there.

"That was just it; it worked out way too easily. I got up from my chair, immediately told my colleague this was worth every penny."

From a handful of quotes a month to 30–40 a week

Quote volume has grown dramatically. Kaylee estimates she now completes 30 to 40 quotes a week, including a single day where she processed sixteen. Some of that volume comes from Cableteque's saved-configuration and refresh tools, which let her re-cost previously quoted jobs almost instantly rather than starting from scratch. "That was one of the easiest costing sheets I've had to do in a really long time. It just took two seconds."

A multi-tab, always-moving workflow

Kaylee typically runs Cableteque quotes in parallel, with about five tabs open at once, different BOMs or drawings processing simultaneously while she works through AI-generated questions on whichever is ready. "By the time I'm done with this one quote, the next quote is now ready for me. It doesn't overwhelm me at all, because I'm just going from tab to tab checking in on them."

Freeing up the team, not just the buyer

With sourcing largely automated, Kaylee has become a floater for Electro-Prep's sales team, helping absorb their backlog so they aren't quoting on weekends. One salesperson now builds quotes entirely by uploading a BOM and saving the configuration, skipping questions the team already knows the answers to.

One feature Kaylee relies on daily is the clickable vendor links that show what other suppliers call a given part number. She was ecstatic when she noticed Cableteque carried over content from a prior RFQ when she requested a quote for a part she'd already sourced: "That saved me a lot of time, and I was really happy yesterday. That was my favorite thing yesterday, but I have different favorites every week," she said.

Looking Ahead

Kaylee describes Cableteque less as software and more as a teammate. "It's the best assistant that I could ask for. It's not doing all of the work, but a good portion of the sourcing, and it allows me to get other work done within my job... it checks our processes, it takes the human error out of everything, and I feel like I can really trust it."

That trust has extended to longtime team members who were initially skeptical of an AI-driven system after years on Excel. Her advice to anyone hesitant to switch: give it one real run-through. "I think that one time doing it is going to show you... to have that confidence just after one time, it allows me to feel like we're making the right steps to growing in our business."

Kaylee also credits Cableteque for staying responsive to feedback from teams like hers. "It's pretty rare for a company to listen to their customers, hear what they need, and already start implementing it," she said. "So thank you so, so much."