Cableteque Launches Quoteque™: Revolutionizing Wire Harness Design, Sourcing, and Quoting

If you are reading this, you probably care about wire harnesses. Depending on your role at your company you might also have to deal with the design, manufacturing or integration of wire harnesses. Since there are so many uses, applications and environments wire harnesses have to address, it is never a one size fits all proposition. Each wire harness has its own unique set of demands and a path that isn’t as clear as you would like it to be.  And if you have done any of those things as part of your job you know that it is never simple

Arik Vrobel, founder of Cableteque, has been there. He has done that. And now he wants to change that. He has invested his own money to kick this off and is actively looking for investors too.

He wants to use his experience and make it better for others in this industry. His goal is to “Make Wire Harnesses Great Again”.

Placeholder Founders Quote: “At Cableteque my goal is simple: to empower manufacturers and OEMs to succeed in ways they never imagined possible, by revolutionizing wire harness design, and bridging the gap between them.  This will eliminate errors, slash costs, and accelerate their time-to-market”

Arik Vrobel, Founder and CEO

Arik is a second generation “Wire Harness Guy”.  When you meet him, you will realize that his 30 plus years of experience in this business have helped form him into the person he is today. In the past, Arik has worked side by side with his father who founded El-com systems, Arik is currently partnering with his son Aidan Vrobel, AKA third generation “Wire Harness Guy”. Aidan is Cableteque’s Head of Growth.

After selling El-com systems to Winchester Interconnect, a subsidiary of Aptiv PLC (NYSE:APTV) in 2021, Arik decided to create Cableteque to address the key challenges in wire harness design and manufacturing to help close the gap and bring all wire harness stakeholders together.

At the end of the day, they are really two sides of the same coin. By making it easier for one side, you help the other too.

Since “Red States’ and “Blue States” are still fresh in our memory from last year’s election

Imagine for a minute OEMs as “Red Stakeholders” and Contract Manufacturers as “Blue Stakeholders”. Cableteque plans on bringing blue and red stakeholders together and launching its purple revolution. No more Blue, or Red. Just Purple. 

In the last 100 years wire harnesses have evolved from a novelle approach to binding and securing wires in the automotive industry, to a complex multipurpose array of electrical and electronic connections used across multiple industries in a variety of applications. As the complexity has increased, so have the challenges involved in designing, manufacturing and testing them in a reliable and cost-effective fashion. Cableteque is a Wire Harness Software Startup founded by Wire Harness People. Its genesis is from a multi-generational contract Wire Harness Manufacturer family using its own trials and tribulations in the business and first-hand experience as the foundation of creating a modular software bundle that will help untangle the problems and provide a better way to harness the wire.

Wire harnesses and software

While designing and manufacturing wire harnesses isn’t easy, making software requires a whole different set of skills. To address this Cableteque has recruited and hired over thirty software development experts with experience in product management, coding and wire harness and engineering software. The team which is distributed across three continents works around the clock to capture, define and implement a growing list of customer requests. Coming from the industry and focusing on wire harnesses Cabletque can translate those requests into actionable development plans that can be executed rapidly. Since its Go To Market (GTM) software strategy is a SaaS approach, the product and its enhancements are continuous and can be put to good use quickly. This is extremely helpful since these additions can impact many users at once, resulting in an exponential effect across the industry. As a “30-year-Old Startup in the Making”, Cableteque has been considering how to approach the market methodically, and to pivot quickly to incorporate stakeholder inputs. Here is the 2025-2027 GTM plan as it stands today. In the next few years, Cableteque will be partnering with the stakeholders in the wire harness business and sequentially addressing the challenges they face.

Taking a three-phase approach Cableteque will focus on delivering solutions to the wire harness contract manufacturing stakeholders, allowing them to automate and overcome a few of their time consuming and manual processes. By doing this contract manufacturers will be able to provide OEM’s a faster turnaround time on quotes, capture and incorporate design changes quickly and offer shorter delivery times by improving their sourcing capabilities. In addition to helping OEMs get what they want faster, this will also open up new opportunities for contract manufacturers to pursue more aggressive growth plans and enter new markets. New markets that they couldn’t scale into due to lack of access to relevant industry knowledge and specialty suppliers.

The second phase starting in early 2026 will be helping the OEM’s better communicate with wire harness manufacturers in a more accurate and timely fashion. Part of this will be by mapping unique OEM requirements to specialized contract manufacturers’ capabilities. Cableteque will be able to assist OEMs and validate their designs earlier in the product development process. This will result in eliminating errors and better predict any idiosyncrasies that would need to be addressed later in the process. Leading to faster quoting, tooling selection and manufacturing processes, shorter lead times and fewer delays.

The third phase will be integrating Cableteque’ s unique wire harness tools into existing and future enterprise design, simulation and manufacturing tools. Since Cableteque is wire harness centric, its knowledge, resources and focus are set on addressing the needs of this relatively small niche in the electro-mechanical industries. By filling the holes and connecting with the existing design and manufacturing solutions, Cableteque will address the problems they haven’t or can’t, allowing them to focus on their core strengths and not have to spread their resources too thinly.   This will result in smarter more effective solutions for their mutual customers moving forward.

To quote, or not to quote-That is the question

One of the main challenges wire harness contract manufacturers have shared with Cableteque is the time-consuming, mostly manual quoting process. This process rarely takes advantage of automation, or software tools apart from some of the largest manufacturers in the industry trying to tackle it with their own costly customized solutions. This creates a serious bottleneck for both OEMs and contract manufacturers moving from RFQ to PO to delivery. In some cases, the time to quote is so long that the contract may have already been awarded to someone else before certain manufacturers are able to reply. This is both frustrating and a waste of time and effort for all parties involved.

Quoteque™-Faster quoting, More options, Better results

Cableteque’ s newly released Quoteque™ product is designed to greatly accelerate the quoting process. Depending on the complexity of the wire harness it will reduce turnaround time from weeks to days, or even from days  to hours  . It starts this by automatically converting OEM’s PDF and/or native drawings into actionable content that is then used to instantly source components from a variety of suppliers. Cableteque is establishing strategic partnerships with a constantly growing number of component suppliers and distributors. Rather than doing a time consuming web search accessing websites, apps or calling multiple suppliers a Quoteque™ user has direct access to an extremely broad selection of inventory, lead times and price points to select from. This current release focuses on material sourcing, while the next release scheduled for Q2 2025 will address labor operations costing as well, culminating in a complete automated wire harness workflow and quoting solution.  

Here are some of Quoteque™ highlights:

Arik and the rest of the Cableteque invite you to join “the Purple Revolution” and help make wire harnesses great againFor more information about Cableteque in general, or Quoteque™ specifically please visit their website at https://cableteque.com  or schedule a meeting today.