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50 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2026 Quoting: Lost in Time Steve Pilipchuk is vice president of Wallace Elec- tronics, a custom cable and wire harness manu- facturer based in Dallas, Texas, serving aero- space, medical, military, and industrial automation customers since 1977. He has been at Wallace for 26 years, making him as much a part of the company's institutional knowledge as anyone. By his own candid admission, he is also one of the slowest adopters of the digital quoting platform he spent two years championing and is only now onboarding. "Quoting is an investment in a potential customer," Pilipchuk says. "It's time-consuming, it's resource-consuming, and your hit rate on new opportunities isn't a whole lot better than Vegas." The process he's describing will be familiar to anyone who has run a custom harness shop. A customer print arrives. Someone scans it, manually enters the data, re-enters it into the ERP system, and validates it. Then they build out labor steps for every element of the drawing, translating a two- dimensional print into the cost structure of a three- dimensional finished assembly. Then they cost it. For a single complex assembly, that process can consume days. It's common for a customer to submit five or six similar but distinct assemblies in one RFQ, and for the team to run the entire process five or six times. "There weren't really shortcuts," Pilipchuk says, "and inevitably, the first person who can get a quote back is the person to get the job." To keep up with demand, Wallace expanded its quoting department from one or two people to four dedicated quoters. It kept the company competi- tive, but it created a hard ceiling. "The only way to increase my bandwidth was to add more people," Pilipchuk says. "That's just not a sustainable model for continued growth. You can't exponentially grow a quoting team to grow a business." In other words, the system worked until working wasn't enough. If It Ain't Broke… The wire harness industry's relationship with digital transformation is complicated by something that runs deeper than budget constraints or technology skepticism. These are shops built on skill. Estima- tors have spent years building their expertise in understanding assembly challenges, labor costs, sourcing risks, and pricing. Their processes, however slow and manual, are working. Asking them to trust a software platform to do it for them in a fraction of the time is a big ask. "Our current system wasn't perfect, but it worked, and it had kept our company in business for a long time," says Pilipchuk. At Wallace, the existing quoting process was a hybrid of ERP and Excel that had evolved organi- cally over the years. It was imperfect but deeply understood. When Pilipchuk first encountered Cableteque, he recognized immediately what it could mean for the business. The platform is purpose-built for wire harness quoting, automating BOM extraction from customer prints, pulling real-time supplier pricing, and generating labor- based cost estimates in hours rather than days. He committed early, but it took two years before Wallace began onboarding. "We got caught putting out fires, and day-to-day stuff," he says. "But it was like Groundhog Day; the same problems wouldn't go away until we finally forced the issue." There was also a more specific concern. His quoting team, rather than seeing the potential of a quote that was 80–85% complete in minutes, focused on the exceptions the software couldn't yet handle perfectly. "My team focused on the Steve Pilipchuck ▼