How Border States Cut Quoting Time by 45% and Doubled Dollars Quoted with Parspec
Background
With more than 125 branches in 33 states and roughly $5 billion in annual revenue, Border States is one of the largest electrical distributors in the United States. Its employee-ownership model has always been a strength, building unusually deep tenure across the workforce. Attracting and retaining the best talent and getting them trained quickly is important, so that as veteran employee-owners retire, as they do each year, the transition is smooth.
Operations and IT leaders at Border States saw this coming and refused to treat it as a hiring problem alone. Instead, they framed it as a technology and process problem and set out to find an AI partner that could help their people do more, respond faster, and elevate the customer experience.
The Cost of Growing on Legacy Systems
Before Parspec, quoting and submittals at Border States ran on manual, repetitive work that a shrinking, tenured workforce could no longer afford. Quotation specialists keyed in bills of materials and pricing by hand. To prepare submittal packages, project managers chased down spec sheets across manufacturer websites, personal desktops, and shared drives, then annotated them by hand. Both processes were slow and error-prone, delaying delivery and quietly eroding customer trust.
An even higher cost showed up in ramp time. Mastering Border States' legacy systems took new employees years, and every retirement pushed that finish line further out.
Border States set four business goals for a new technology partner. Their overarching objective was to free employees to spend their energy growing the business, not on administrative work or learning how to navigate legacy technology:
What Border States Achieved With Parspec
Border States and Parspec built a repeatable process that embeds AI directly into quoting and submittal workflows, closing the gap that legacy systems opened by augmenting what teams already knew and absorbing operational complexity so employees could focus on higher-value work. The result maps directly to the four goals Border States set out to achieve.
Parspec's AI reads construction drawings, sales agent quotes, and manufacturer quotes; then it identifies applicable product information and assembles a structured bill of materials automatically. This gives quotation specialists a fast, accurate starting point for every bid, no matter how the source material arrives in the request for quote (RFQ).
Parspec matches every BOM line item to the correct, current cut sheets, manuals, and warranties from an indexed catalog of more than 3.2 million documents across 4,000+ manufacturers, eliminating hours of manual document hunting and ensuring current and accurate documentation with every quote and submittal.
Parspec identifies model numbers and configurations within each cut sheet automatically, enabling one-click markups instead of manual annotation. It learns from past team markups over time, cutting repeat work and the errors that trigger revision requests.
Parspec automatically identifies products that match a specification and are either in inventory or from a preferred supplier, so new hires don't need years of tenure to know what to quote.
A drill-down view of what was quoted before, including product, quantity, pricing, win or loss, surfaces exactly when a quotations specialist needs it. Pricing knowledge that once lived in a tenured employee’s memory now lives in the platform, accessible to everyone.
Generate company-branded quote and submittal packages with cut sheets attached directly to line items, so every deliverable is consistent, complete, and polished, regardless of who built it.
Quotations specialists respond to customers in half the time of legacy systems, fast enough to win business from competitors who simply can't keep pace.
Parspec keeps Border States' pricing and sales data strictly confidential, never shared with third parties for any reason. Data is encrypted at rest and in transit, hosted on US-based servers, and protected by SSO with role-based access controls. Parspec is SOC 2 Type II-certified, backed by regular audits and continuous monitoring.
Rolling Out at Enterprise Scale, Without Slowing Down
Rolling out a new platform across an organization the size of Border States meant managing change across 16 field operations areas, regions, and business banners, including Sequel Electrical Supply and Grid Solutions, each with its own workflows, customer base, and pace of adoption.
Rather than launch company-wide all at once, Parspec and Border States phased the rollout area by area over about a month and a half. Each supervisory group received dedicated onboarding support, plus ongoing monthly office hours and workshops, giving every area room to build proficiency at its own pace while the broader rollout kept moving. This phased approach let Border States surface and resolve edge cases in individual areas before they could compound into problems enterprise-wide, so momentum never stalled and no single group carried the burden of piloting the platform alone.
The pace of adoption reflected it: within four months, more than 1,300 Border States employees were onboarded, a scale most enterprise software rollouts take a year or more to reach. By year's end, 89% of Border States' quotes and submittals were running through Parspec.
Results That Outpaced Expectations
The rollout translated into measurable gains in quoting capacity, new-hire productivity, and the ability to scale without adding headcount.
Border States
For a workforce losing nearly 1,200 years of institutional knowledge annually, these weren't incremental gains. They were compounding ones, showing up in both individual output and speed-to-proficiency.
Automation also freed people to focus on the work that actually differentiates a distributor. For Border States, Parspec is one pillar of a broader strategy to treat AI as a revenue driver, not just a cost-cutting tool.
By retaining institutional knowledge, expanding workforce capacity, and helping new hires become productive faster as part of that broader strategy, Border States can meet rising project demand without sacrificing customer experience or the employee-ownership culture that defines it.
Border States
Building the Future of Project Execution
Border States has never waited to adopt technology after the fact. When Parspec set out to build Project Management, a new solution for post-award execution, in the fall of 2025, Border States stepped up as a co-development partner.
As one of a select group of leading distributors co-developing Project Management with Parspec, Border States brought firsthand knowledge of the labor-intensive workflows driving up cost to serve and the difficulty of keeping contractors informed on order and delivery status in real time.
The result: a single platform that replaces a disconnected stack of email, spreadsheets, and ERP modules with a unified workflow across order management, fulfillment, change orders, billing, and customer visibility, fully integrated with Border States' ERP.
Parspec
Border States
For Border States, Project Management is the natural next step after quoting: a single AI-native platform that runs the entire project lifecycle, from bid to close-out, letting a distributed, employee-owned organization grow with greater efficiency, consistency, and service quality at every stage of the project lifecycle.
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