Overview - aPriori Enterprise Cost Management Platform

The aPriori Enterprise Cost Management Software Platform is the first solution to bring much needed innovation to product manufacturers by providing real-time, predictive and precise cost assessments throughout the entire product development and production delivery process.

As discrete product companies see increased price pressure from customers, rising supplier costs and overseas competition, the pressure to improve the bottom line is significant.

Traditional cost estimation techniques, such as contract quoting or statistical analysis of historical or similar production parts, are time-intensive and immediately invalidated whenever a design, manufacturing or procurement decision is changed.

aPriori enables designers, manufacturing engineers and planners, purchasing and sourcing professionals, cost managers, program management and company executives to make better decisions to reduce, avoid and recover product costs. With aPriori, companies can reduce the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) by whole percentages by identifying quantifiable savings in material, tooling, labor and overhead while evaluating alternative designs, processes and sources.

Automatically Generated Cost Assessments

The aPriori Enterprise Cost Management software platform brings together the critical pieces of relevant cost information to generate precise product cost assessments. These pieces typically exist with different functional groups, but are all necessary to generate precise cost assessments.

aPriori understands the product cost drivers that are based on a product’s design (i.e., those aspects of the product's design that drive costs). Called Geometric Cost Drivers (GCDs), aPriori automatically captures these through its direct CAD integration. Representative GCDs are a product's size, shape, complexity, number of holes, number of bends, thickness, profile, tolerances and roughness of surfaces, etc. aPriori is automatically and continuously evaluating the CAD model looking for GCDs using its patented aPriori Geometric Assessment technology.

aPriori also understands the product cost drivers that are not based on the product’s design, but are based on either commercial considerations (e.g., production volume) or based on how and where a product could be manufactured. These are called Non-Geometric Cost Driver’s (NGCDs). Data to support costing these NGCDs are captured and modeled in aPriori’s Virtual Production Environments (VPEs). A VPE is aPriori’s representation of the manufacturing capabilities and costing methodology of a particular factory or production facility. A VPE captures data about the manufacturing processes supported by that factory, the machines needed to support those processes, the raw materials used in that factory, the viable routings in that factory and the cost structure of the factory (i.e., labor rates, overhead rates, material costs, etc.).

aPriori reliably combines all of this information using it’s unique and patented technology of physics based mechanistic process models to generate precise product cost assessments. The advantage of aPriori’s product cost assessments is that they are generated early in the product development process and continuously throughout this process, before a product goes to production. As changes are made to the design, to the manufacturing process, to sourcing activities, or by program or project management, the cost assessments generated by aPriori are updated in real-time to reflect those changes. This cost assessment information is made available to all functional groups in the organization whose everyday decisions contribute to product costs:

  • Design Engineering
  • Manufacturing Engineering
  • Manufacturing Process Planning
  • Cost estimation, Value Analysis/Value Engineering
  • Purchasing, Procurement, Sourcing
  • Program and Project Management


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With aPriori, everyone in the organization who impacts costs continuously has visibility to the latest cost information about the product. Product related changes or decisions that they make automatically update the product cost information for everyone else. aPriori puts the ability to generate cost assessments, which had traditionally been in the realm of a few specialists at a company, into the hands of all who impact product costs. Its ability to generate cost assessments dynamically, in real-time eliminates the traditionally disconnected static nature of product costing. With aPriori’s product cost assessments, users know product costs continuously and are able to successfully complete their cost reductions efforts in real-time and meet their cost targets.

Product Features


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The aPriori Universal Client provides 3D visualization, detailed real-time break down of the costing, a navigation tree and panels for managing the processes, routings, facilities, cost drivers and materials used.
  • A patented technology solution captures product design information, production facility capabilities and cost structure data, along with customer-specific manufacturing cost accounting methodologies. This enables companies to assess, control and reduce Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) by identifying quantifiable savings in material, tooling, labor and overhead while evaluating alternative designs, processes and sources.
  • Enterprise-wide support for cost management is enabled by providing appropriate functionality to all user communities that impact cost. Design, manufacturing, procurement and product/program management can interact with the same cost platform to assess and manage product costs from concept stages though production delivery.
  • Virtual Production Environments (VPEs) model the characteristics of a factory including the manufacturing processes supported in that facility, machines required to support those processes, and the factory’s cost structure (including labor and overhead rates, machine rates, material costs, etc.). A VPE can be created to represent internal factories and external factories, as well as supplier factories. Product costs are calculated in various VPEs enabling a fast determination of the “should cost” to manufacture or source a product.
  • Integration with industry standard CAD solutions supports direct evaluation of the Geometric Cost Drivers (GCDs) from the solid model. aPriori’s patent-protected, physics-based deterministic models calculate cost every time the designer makes a change. In addition, aPriori’s data structure may link to the user’s other enterprise systems such as ERP, PLM or corporate databases, through standard XML protocols.
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  • An Embedded Reporting Engine creates reports in a PDF format for part costs, assembly costs and product cost comparisons.
 The aPriori Cost Ticker ™ is a compact, real-time display that that is presented in the CAD system.  It provides Designers a visual summary of material, labor, direct overhead, period overhead and amortized tooling costs while they are using their CAD system

Specifications:

  • aPriori supports Microsoft Windows XP Pro and Windows 2000/2003 Server
  • CAD intergration available for PTC Pro/ENGINEER® Wildfire 2.0 & 3.0
  • Certified for SAP Netweaver®