Most wire harness shops quote in Excel. Not because nobody has thought about it, but because Excel is the only tool that never says no: any customer document, any oddity, any exception fits into a cell. The question is not whether it works — it does. The question is what it costs once quoting stops being an occasional task and becomes the constraint on how much business you can take on.
Where the hours actually go
Time an estimator to the minute and the same four blocks show up every time, in roughly this order:
- Reading the inquiry. A PDF drawing, an Excel BOM in the customer’s own format, sometimes a photo of a printed sheet, and an email that quietly amends all three. Nothing here is standardised, and nothing is machine-readable.
- Transcribing the bill of materials. Every line typed into the sheet by hand: wire type, cross-section, length, connector, contact, seal, sleeve. A 60-line harness is 60 opportunities to mistype a part number.
- Looking up prices. Distributor portal, catalogue PDF, a purchase order from last spring, or a phone call. One line at a time.
- Estimating labour. Crimps, strips, seals, twists, taping, testing — usually from experience rather than from a rate card, because writing down every step takes longer than the quote is worth.
Only the last of those four is skilled work. The other three are transcription, and transcription is where the hours go.
The four costs nobody puts in the spreadsheet
1. The estimator is a single point of failure
In most shops the calculation logic lives inside one person’s workbook — the surcharges, the scrap allowances, the “we always add ten percent on that connector family” rules. It is rarely written down anywhere else. When that person is on holiday, quoting slows down. When they leave, part of the company’s pricing knowledge leaves with them.
2. Prices go stale quietly
A copied price does not announce that it is out of date. Copper moves, distributor stock moves, minimum order quantities change, and a figure pasted from a quote six months ago still looks exactly as authoritative as one pulled this morning. The error only surfaces after you have won the job at the old number.
3. Two estimators, two prices
Give the same inquiry to two people with two workbooks and you will get two different prices, often several percent apart. Neither is wrong, exactly — they made different reasonable assumptions about labour, scrap and margin. But it means your quoted price depends partly on who happened to be free that week, which is difficult to defend to a customer who quotes you against yourself.
4. You cannot reconstruct why you lost
When a quote comes back rejected on price, the useful question is which part was too expensive: the material, the labour, or the margin. A spreadsheet that has been overwritten four times cannot answer that. Without traceable line-level costs, every post-mortem becomes an opinion.
Why moving it into the ERP does not fix it
The obvious next step is to quote inside the system that already holds your parts and your orders. It helps less than expected, for a structural reason: an ERP is built to manage material that already exists in the item master. Quoting a custom harness is the opposite problem. At the moment the inquiry lands, most of those parts are not in your system at all, and the specification is sitting in a drawing that no ERP can read.
So the transcription work does not disappear — it moves. Someone still reads the drawing, still decides which cable the customer means, still creates the items. The ERP is genuinely good at what happens after you win the order. It was never designed to interpret an ambiguous customer document, and asking it to is asking the wrong tool.
What actually has to change
The bottleneck is not arithmetic. Excel is excellent at arithmetic. The bottleneck is getting from an unstructured customer document to a structured, priced bill of materials — and that is the step that has to be automated rather than tidied.
In practice that means four things happening before a human looks at anything:
- the drawing and BOM are read and turned into structured lines, whatever format they arrive in;
- every line is matched against a component database, with current distributor prices and availability;
- labour steps are assigned from the harness’s actual construction, against your rates;
- the result is a line-by-line cost breakdown that says where each number came from.
The estimator still decides. What changes is that they start from a complete draft and spend their time on the parts that need judgement — an ambiguous connector, a tolerance that drives cost, a margin call on a strategic customer — instead of typing part numbers.
Side by side
| Feature | Excel | ERP quoting module | Nuqo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reads customer drawings and BOMs | No | No | Yes |
| Works before parts exist in your system | Yes | No | Yes |
| Current distributor prices per line | No | Partial | Yes |
| Consistent between estimators | No | Yes | Yes |
| Line-level cost traceability | No | Yes | Yes |
| Handles a format it has never seen | Yes | No | Yes |
| Labour steps from the harness build | manual | manual | Yes |
Excel wins one row outright, and it is the row that explains why it is still everywhere: it never refuses an input. Any replacement has to match that flexibility, or estimators will quite rightly keep a spreadsheet open beside it.
The honest summary
If you quote a handful of harnesses a month and one person does all of them, Excel is a reasonable answer and a new system will not pay for itself. The economics change when quoting starts costing you work — when inquiries wait days for a number, when you decline RFQs because there is no capacity to price them, or when the person who knows the calculation becomes a scheduling problem. At that point the spreadsheet is not saving money. It is capping revenue.
