The challenge
MAPSA S.A. is the only Argentine-owned company that manufactures cable harnesses for top-tier automakers. It competes in a demanding, globalized market where most inputs are imported and its main rivals are multinationals with greater scale, international footprints and operating advantages. The structural cost gap can reach 30% to 40%, which makes internal efficiency the only ground where the company can truly compete.
The most critical bottleneck was quoting new projects. Quoting a harness means analyzing highly complex electrical and dimensional drawings, identifying every component, quantifying operations against 89 internal standards and cross-checking all of it with costs in the ERP. A typical project of 30 to 40 harnesses took about 300 hours of engineering work.
The underlying problem was that quoting is, to a large extent, already producing: 70% of the technical development is done before the company knows whether it has won the project. Every lost bid meant hundreds of hours of work with no return, and responding in a reasonable time required putting several people on the same analysis at once.