What does it mean to be Rapidly Deployable?
How many times have you tried to deploy an enterprise level platform only to find that the project had extended significantly beyond what was originally planned? Services personnel from your application vendor spend months coding and testing customizations to their software so it will work in your company’s environment. By the time the project is ready for production deployment, your company needs to start updating it again, kicking off another in a seemingly endless cycle of customization changes, testing, and redeployments.

aPriori is different.

Out of the box you can be productive using the aPriori Enterprise Cost Management software platform. It can be used from day one to generate product cost assessments of your products using aPriori’s Industry Sample factories (in the aPriori software platform, factory models are known as “Virtual Production Environment’s” or VPE’s). aPriori Industry Sample VPE’s generate precise cost assessments that show you the relative cost effects of your design, manufacturing, and sourcing decisions, before your products go to production.

With aPriori you can even take this a step further. In a matter of weeks, aPriori’s professional services group will further improve the quality of your cost information, by generating VPE’s for your internal factories and/or those of your suppliers. These customer VPE’s reflect your specific factories’ manufacturing capabilities and cost structure, as well as those of your suppliers.

How is aPriori Deployed Rapidly?
aPriori has developed sophisticated technology in the form of mechanistic models of many manufacturing processes. These models are based on the physics of the processes themselves. They automatically calculate physical quantity information such as the time a given manufacturing process will take and the material utilization of that process. The aPriori Enterprise Cost Management software platform then translates these physical quantities to costs by applying common costing methods using the labor, overhead, and material cost rates of a given factory. As these models are based on physical reality, they are generally applicable and don’t change based on customer or location. They can be used immediately upon installation to help you assess and reduce product cost. This unique capability is what speeds aPriori deployment.

These models can be configured to reflect a customer or supplier factory by applying a limited set of data (e.g. typical process routings, machine capabilities, and factory cost structure information such as labor rates, overhead rates, and material costs) specific to that individual factory. VPE’s are used in aPriori to store this factory specific data pertinent to costing products manufactured in that factory. An aPriori installation may contain many VPE’s that helping you to understand the unique cost differences of producing the product in different factories.

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The aPriori Industry Sample plants are VPE’s that are available as part of the aPriori Enterprise Cost Management software platform upon installation. These are sample factories representing different geographies and which include information based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data, material cost data, machine capacity and parameter data as well as other data necessary to support costing products immediately with aPriori. With these VPE’s, you can be costing your products right away.

If you want to improve the quality of your cost information even further to have it reflect the specific capabilities and cost structure of your factories or those of your suppliers, aPriori can create and configure those VPE’s quickly, in a matter of weeks as part of a guided implementation. The results of this activity are VPE’s, which you own, and which reflect the actual costs you would incur by producing products at those facilities and which are easily maintainable as the capabilities or the cost structure of your factories evolve over time.

What does this mean for you?
The result is simple: aPriori is up and running sooner, allowing you to reduce costs. Furthermore, these cost assessments can reflect the capabilities and cost structure of your factories or those of your suppliers.

With a minimum of effort aPriori is providing cost visibility to all those involved in the design and production delivery process who directly impact product costs; engineering, process planning, manufacturing, sourcing, and program management, helping them make cost informed decisions or conversely preventing decisions from being made in a cost knowledge “vacuum”. In a minimum amount of time you can be using aPriori to help you understand the cost consequences of those decisions and help you lower your product costs.