Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1544155
44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 not uncommon for a quote package to have 50 assemblies or more. Quotes come in large data packages and end up sitting idle across different processes, not unlike work on the manufacturing floor. Historically, when a quoter gets 50 assem- blies, it takes about three weeks to complete the quote. We can reduce this process to two or three days and, when necessary, do it in one day. If we really want to push it, we can do it in two to three hours. There may be some trade-offs in accuracy, but it's often just as accurate as the quote that took two to three weeks. This is a huge benefit for the customer. In the OEM's eyes, wire harnesses are always late, even before they're procured; a two-week quote rep- resents two weeks of lost production time. Quite often, the wire harness company that quotes fastest wins the business even if it ends up being more expensive. We undertake a lot of data check- ing and validation during the quoting process, and we're continuing to develop new quoting features. Since the designs themselves are usually incom- plete or incorrect, some problems aren't found until the manufacturing process. To address com- mon mistakes up front, we've instituted checks that identify issues within an hour or two of quoting. Correcting errors before making assemblies on the shop floor makes the company more professional and a better supplier to their OEMs. That's more than pricing out a bill of materials. You're engineering and validating against the design. It's a different process. Absolutely. This provides an important level of professionalism to the product realization process. That's the accuracy part. Now, how do your products help to automate quoting? Everything we do is about automation. We're connecting many disparate processes into a single workflow. Usually, a quote goes through various functions within a company: engineering, supply chain, accounting, and purchasing. With all the typical back-and-forth, engineering finds issues, it goes back to the supply chain; the supply chain finds issues, and it goes back to engineering. Sometimes it goes back to the customer. To us, it's all one connected workflow. Because we handle both asynchronously, we can identify the discrepancy. Then, one individual can handle an entire quote, rather than multiple teams with different priorities and different sets of bottlenecks in their processes. To get there, we invested heavily in technology for our platform. For example, we've had to develop technology to read customer drawings. Most cus- tomer drawings and their requirements come in PDF format, with dozens of other formats also in use. Often, the designers are unclear about what should be in those drawings. So, the first problem that we had to solve was getting all this data into our system accurately and making it machine- readable. It's more than just using an OCR. There's a lot of tech- nology to combine all those tools. We do use best-in-class OCR and AI tools to accomplish this, but it's the bound- aries built out of our domain expertise that make the difference.