One person carries your quoting operation. Here is what happens when that changes.
FROM ARIK VROBEL, FOUNDER & CEO
We promised this one back in April and then got carried away with the AI BOM launch in May. So here it finally is, properly.
Every shop I talk to has a version of the same situation. One or two people carry the whole quoting operation. They know the drawings, they know the suppliers, they know which callouts to trust and which to push back on. That knowledge is not written down anywhere. It lives in their heads and their habits.
And then one day they hand in their notice.
I have seen it happen. Six months to train someone new, if you can find someone. A backlog that piles up while they ramp. Deals that go to a competitor who can actually respond. The shop does not fall apart overnight but it gets quieter, and some of those customers do not come back.
The right answer is to get that knowledge into a system before you need it. Not as a backup plan, but as the way you work every day. When your process runs through software rather than through one person's memory, a resignation is an HR problem, not a business crisis.
The real risk hiding in your quoting operation
When the knowledge walks out, everything slows down.
In our research with the WHMA Innovation Advisory Team, 57% of wire harness manufacturers said BOM completeness is their biggest challenge. That number makes sense when you think about who holds that knowledge. It is usually one person who has been doing it for 15 or 20 years and knows exactly what the drawing is not telling you.
The same research found that 73% of shops describe their quoting process as manual and too slow. Those two things are connected. Manual processes depend on the people running them. When that person is unavailable, on holiday, or gone, the process slows to a crawl or stops entirely.
Training a replacement takes six to twelve months, assuming you can find someone with the right background. During that window your quoting capacity drops, your backlog grows, and the customers waiting on quotes do not always wait around.
The shops below did not solve this by hiring better. They solved it by making sure the knowledge lives in a system, not just a person. Here is what happened when they did.
Customer story
30 years of manual quoting. Then this.
Derrick Lang has 30 years in wire harness manufacturing. In that time he tested every quoting tool available and kept coming back to Excel because nothing else actually worked for harnesses. He knew the problem intimately because he was the problem. The knowledge lived with him.
After switching to Cableteque he cut quote turnaround by 70% and multiplied quoting capacity fivefold without adding headcount. But the bigger change was operational. His standards, his preferences, his way of reading a drawing: all of it is now in a system that anyone on his team can use.
"I can quote these things faster than any of my competitors that aren't on Cableteque. It's like, well, you better get on this software and catch up because I'm gonna start taking your business."
If reading this issue has you thinking about whether now is the right time to make a change, this is the guide we put together to help you work through it. It covers how to assess your current situation, how to calculate what the status quo is actually costing you, and how to make the case to ownership. No pressure, just the framework.
Your Fastest Path to Growth is Stuck in a Spreadsheet
What happens when your quoting process depends on one person and a set of spreadsheets only they fully understand? Worth a read if you are thinking about what happens next.
Here's why operations managers love Cableteque for faster, error-free wire harness quotes
The operational view on what changes when quoting stops being a bottleneck. Good for sharing with someone who manages the team rather than sitting in it.
What is happening across the wire harness industry this year, and why the shops moving fastest on quoting efficiency are the ones best positioned to take advantage of it.
If you missed the launch last month, here is what that means for your quoting process. You send RFQs, distributors send quotes back, and someone has to retype all that pricing into a spreadsheet. Not anymore. Drop the document into Cableteque and the pricing goes straight into your quote.
Works with any supplier format, clean spreadsheet or messy PDF
No retyping, no copy-pasting
Same drag and drop you already use for customer drawings
In July we are putting real numbers on the cost of slow quoting. Not the soft costs you can wave away in a budget meeting, but what it actually does to revenue, margins, and capacity when turnaround runs at three weeks instead of three days. If you have ever tried to make this case internally and struggled to get it to land, July's issue will give you the numbers to do it properly.
Still evaluating a change?
Bring a real drawing to a demo and see how your quoting process looks in Cableteque.
