Setting the digital pace: How Indak is quoting in days, not weeks, with Luminovo

For 70 years, Indak has built the kind of electronics its customers count on. From its roots in ignition switches for cars and boats to its current portfolio of circuit board assemblies across five US facilities and a distribution hub in Germany, the company has earned a reputation for reliability and craftsmanship. The manufacturing engine has always been strong. What Indak's leadership wanted next was a quoting operation to match it.

"We were looking for something to cut out a lot of our quoting time." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak

The starting point: a quoting process ready to scale

Indak ran its quoting workflow on Microsoft Excel and email. For each RFQ, someone on the team manually typed long manufacturer part numbers into spreadsheets, sent the BOM out to ten or more suppliers, and waited. A 100-component BOM took several days to load into the cost sheet before pricing requests could even go out.

In the previous workflow, someone on the team would enter manufacturer part numbers (MPNs) into spreadsheets, send the BOM out to ten or more suppliers, and wait for responses. To hit customer deadlines, the team often had to issue quotes using only the suppliers who responded inside the window. Of ten suppliers, perhaps five would come back within a week, and complex projects could take four to six weeks end to end.

Indak also saw the chance to close two smaller gaps that come with any manual workflow. The first was the risk of part-number typos slipping into a quote. The second was the limited visibility into component lifecycle status at the quoting stage. Catching end-of-life components before an order went in, not after, was a clear win the team wanted to capture.

"We keep pushing our salesmen out there to bring in new business, and they bring in stuff for us to quote, and we end up losing it because we can't do it in time. It's frustrating for everyone involved. We definitely wanted to change that." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak

The solution: one platform from BOM upload to quote-ready data

Indak chose Luminovo to bring its quoting operation up to digital speed. Today the team uploads the customer's BOM directly into Luminovo, and the file comes back structured and usable in minutes. MPNs are pulled straight from the customer's file with the help of AI, so the manual transcription (and the small manual steps that came with it) is gone.

From there, the platform does what Indak's people used to do over weeks of email back-and-forth. It pulls pricing, stock, lifecycle status, and compliance data for every component into a single view. The team works from a complete picture of the market rather than the partial picture they used to get from whichever suppliers happened to respond on time.

Lifecycle visibility is the change Dave keeps coming back to. End-of-life information that used to surface at order time now shows up at the quoting stage. That changes the conversation Indak can have with its customers. When a component is two years from end-of-life, Indak can flag it during the quote and recommend a redesign before it becomes a supply problem - a new standard for their customer service.

Compliance works the same way. What used to involve manual searches across supplier websites is now visible the moment the BOM is loaded. Around five to ten percent of Indak's customers actively ask for compliance data today, and Dave expects that share to grow.

Prototype quotes for circuit board assemblies now take minutes. The team is currently finishing the rollout of the costing templates that will close the final piece of the workflow: overhead costs, customised quote forms, and end-to-end quote issuance inside Luminovo. Both teams, costing and quoting will work on the same data in the same platform, instead of passing spreadsheets between departments.

"You load the bill of materials into Luminovo and it automatically puts everything in a manageable format. You get costing and pricing back within minutes on many components." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak

Before and after

What Indak's customers see now

The most visible change is speed. Circuit board assembly quotes that used to take four to six weeks now come back in days, and prototype pricing arrives in minutes. Customers who used to wait for partial answers now get a complete quote inside the window they asked for, which keeps their projects moving instead of stalling while a supplier finalises pricing.

Pricing has improved alongside the speed. The quote now reflects the full supplier market rather than the first five of ten suppliers to respond, with pricing and stock visibility across every available source. For Indak's customers, that means more competitive component pricing and fewer surprises when it is time to build.

Indak also flags end-of-life and lifecycle risks during the quote, when the customer still has time to act. Instead of finding out at order time that a component is about to go obsolete, the customer gets a recommendation, sometimes years ahead, to redesign around a part with longer supply life. That shifts Indak's role from supplier to strategic advisor.

"We can go back to our customer and say, you might want to look at a different component for this. You've only got two years on this. You should probably do a little bit of a redesign now." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak

Compliance follows the same logic. Around five to ten percent of Indak's customers already require compliance data with every quote, and that share is growing. Where Indak's team used to search supplier websites component by component, those answers now come back in the same response, with no separate request and no extra wait on the customer side.

Manufacturer part numbers are also more reliable. Because Luminovo imports them directly from the customer's BOM file, the small risk of transcription error from manual Excel entry is gone. The quote the customer receives matches what they sent, so there are fewer correction loops and faster sign-off.

"It gives you a snapshot of the entire market at one time. You see pricing from all these different suppliers all at once, and where everybody has stock." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak

Looking ahead: setting the bar for digital quoting in US EMS

The next milestone is bringing the full costing process into Luminovo. Indak is currently setting up overhead cost templates and a customised quote form so the entire workflow, from BOM upload to the quote that goes to the customer, happens inside one platform. Once that piece is live, the handoffs between costing and quoting go away, and so do the version-control errors that come with spreadsheets.

Beyond that, Dave expects compliance and lifecycle data to become a bigger factor in what Indak's customers ask for. The company is positioned to lead on that front, combining 70 years of manufacturing know-how with a digital quoting operation built for the way the industry is moving.

"It's something we've never experienced before. Really cool to be able to get this kind of help that we really needed." Dave Roby, Account Manager, Indak