Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1544155
42 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 the manufacturing floor. During my time in the industry, I've seen many technological and process improvements developed and deployed on the production floor, but almost none on the front-end data side of the process. The front end is where the "digital-to-analog gap" happens. Today, OEMs design in sophisticat- ed 3D CAD, but they flatten that data into "dumb" PDF drawings to send to manufacturers. We force our most expensive engineers to become "digital archaeologists"—spending hours or weeks manu- ally digging through these PDFs to reconstruct a bill of materials and estimate labor. The solution is to create a digital platform to bridge that gap, to use smart automation and AI-based tools to ingest those drawings and instantly convert them into actionable, costed bills of materials and labor estimates, connecting them through the various manufacturer processes before it ever reaches the product realization phase. Where do you start? Quoting is the first step in the business process. All contract manufacturers receive data to quote, which is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that requires some of the company's most expert resources. Even with a huge amount of sunk cost in the process, it still doesn't happen quickly enough for the end customer, and because you typically win just 20% of what you quote, you're leaving 80% as waste. On the production floor, the TPS term for waste is "muda," and we always focus on eliminating muda. In the quoting process, we're wasting 80% of the most technically competent resources in the orga- nization, and to date, we have simply ignored it. We started with quoting as our beachhead, but our vision is to move from quoting into manufactur- ing. The data will stay within our system and will be leveraged to connect the various manufacturing processes, whether they're tools or equipment, so we maintain as much of the digital thread as pos- sible while eliminating the quoting waste. With quoting software in play, how do those business metrics change? Assuming that the 20% win rate still applies even after quoting software is introduced, and because we're automating so much of that function, our data shows that we reduce the human "touch time" by at least 50%, and in some cases, as much as 90%, allowing a team to more than double their output. The next most important metric is the quote turnaround time. The industry standard turnaround time for a quote is two to three weeks, and it's