Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1544155
46 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 er's quotes, you might miss the fact that someone else can provide it for half the price. On the OEM- customer side, you may lose the relationship when you take three weeks to submit a quote that's too high anyway because you weren't thorough enough in finding the right suppliers to optimize the pricing. When you're optimizing their processes, do you look at multiple quotes in your system and con- solidate the same parts across multiple custom- ers or work orders for even better pricing? The normal process we follow is to consolidate all the assemblies to leverage the best pricing. They're not quoting assemblies individually. We let them decide whether to use the pricing across new quotes or just for that quote; it's a customer decision. We're able to tell our customer, the manufacturer, that they've quoted this part 20 times in the past six months and show the pricing if they were to aggregate the quantity. They get some margin numbers back. But we also deliver additional value to the com- ponent suppliers. We can say, "Hey, we have seen this particular wire specified by our aggregate cus- tomers over the past six months, and nobody has it. We have 30 requests for it, requiring 20 miles of wire, and it keeps showing up as 'stock to build' or 'made to order.' If you stock it, customers will buy it." Everybody does better when the right things are in inventory to support demand. Is there a problem for component suppliers in get- ting a good sense of demand? It influences what product the component companies will design next, but they can't respond to demand they can't see. Yes, that's an ongoing issue. By using this common platform and standardizing and normal- izing data, it leverages many requirements across multiple verticals and geographies. That helps component suppliers do a better job supporting the end customers. What is the last remaining piece to quote? Is it manufacturing labor? The last thing to automate is the processing time— the labor quoting—and we're already doing that. We have extensive data and insights on manufac- turing processes. We use the customer's specific processes; some companies take five seconds to complete a process, while others take 10. By reviewing the design, we can identify which of their processes are required for the job, and their time to quote the labor is now reduced by as much as 80%. We're not replacing the expert in the process who's needed to review and validate special cases, but we're taking away 80% of the non-value-added work the expert has to do, so they have the band- width to stop being digital archaeologists and start being architects of the future. How does all this front office automation change what happens on the manufacturing floor? Our goal is to move all this data to the manufac- turing floor. When the company wins the contract, they've got to create drawings or form boards representing what the harness will look like. They also program their wire-processing and cutting machines to meet specific requirements. They create inspection plans. When we combine the data we capture with future functionality under development, we will be able to move our data into those processes, whether it's our own tools or third-party tools. We should be able to commu- nicate with their automated cutting machine and their test equipment. We will be able to communi- cate if they're using ECAD or drafting tools for the harness layout. Would that include programming those digital form boards? Yes. We're eliminating the need for the manu- facturing engineer to re-digitize all the data we already have in our platform. We'll be able to export the data to those downstream systems using protocols and standards we're defining alongside the industry. Arik, thank you for the conversation. SMT007 Photo gallery on next page are from the 2026 WHMA Global Leadership Summit