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.
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:
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.
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.
The rollout translated into measurable gains in quoting capacity, new-hire productivity, and the ability to scale without adding headcount.
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 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.
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.
Hear directly from Border States about preserving institutional knowledge, helping new hires become productive faster, and increasing workforce capacity without adding headcount.
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