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Breaking the Manual Quoting Bottleneck in Wire Harness
April 15, 2026 | Nolan Johnson, SMT007 MagazineEstimated reading time: 1 minute
Arik Vrobel has spent more than 35 years in wire harness manufacturing—starting in EL-Com, his father's shop, building it into a nationally recognized contract manufacturer, and ultimately selling to Aptiv/Winchester in 2021. But retirement didn't last long. Within months, Arik was back, not as a manufacturer this time, but as a technologist. His new company, Cableteque, is building the quoting and data automation platform he always wished existed. As co-chair of the WHMA Innovation Advisory Team (IAT) and the driving force behind an industry-wide quoting pilot program, Arik is now working to solve the problem at scale: an industry where 74% of manufacturers describe quoting as "manual, time-intensive, and too slow," and where a single quote package routinely takes 9–10 days to complete, even though a contract manufacturer typically wins only one in five bids
Nolan Johnson: Arik, what are the problems in wire harness today, and how does Cableteque fit into the solution? What is the value proposition for manufacturers?
Arik Vrobel: From my personal experience, as well as our Cableteque team and industry peers, a huge challenge for wire harness manufacturers is transitioning from the OEM requirements to 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 sophisticated 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 manually 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.
To continue reading this article, which originally appeared in the April 2026 edition of SMT007 Magazine, click here.
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