aPriori: Increasing Manufacturing Profit by Reducing Product Costs
aPriori is increasing the profit of discrete manufacturing companies by reducing their product costs. Through aPriori’s real-time, precise product cost assessments, everyone in an organization who impacts or manages cost always understands the ramifications of every product-related decision they make, from early design through production. aPriori customers increase profit by:
- Reducing Cost of Goods Sold – by lowering product costs (material, labor, overhead)
- Increasing Revenue – through faster time-to-market achieved by streamlining quoting and costing processes
- Decreasing SG&A Expenses – by eliminating the need for post-launch re-design and re-sourcing activities, and reducing late-stage engineering changes
aPriori provides measurable value to all business functions that impact product cost in their everyday decision-making:
Design Engineers
For design engineers, aPriori assesses the cost impact of engineering changes in real-time, helping organizations avoid a number of profit-killing pitfalls including:
- Missed cost targets,
- Delayed product launches,
- Late-stage product redesign, and,
- Post-launch cost reduction projects.
With aPriori, design engineers can better understand the price tag for changes as they are being considered so they can find the optimal balance between functionality, performance, quality, and cost that delivers the maximum value to the customer. Design teams can explore more early design alternatives, routing out cost sooner and resulting in fewer changes later in development when making changes gets incrementally more expensive.
Manufacturing Specialists
aPriori provides manufacturing specials with a production-level costing system that is linked directly to the design engineers' solid models and intent. By providing routing specifications and selections for any number of factories down to the machine level, aPriori enables the manufacturing team to make numerous trade-off decisions -- in materials, routings, locations and more -- to determine the most cost-effective means for manufacturing and/or assembling a part or product.
Procurement/Sourcing/Supply Chain Specialists
Sourcing professionals can take advantage of aPriori’s costing capabilities to help in make/buy decisions, making sure that their companies are not overpaying for sourced parts. aPriori customers identify a great deal of cost savings simply by re-evaluating a part currently being sourced to see how aPriori’s “should-cost” number compares to the price that they are currently paying. Since the manufacturing processes provided by aPriori include cycle times, labor times and amount of overhead, if the two prices don’t match, aPriori customers can ask the supplier for a re-quote. In sourcing, aPriori provides the ability to lower costs through fact-based negotiation with suppliers.
Management
aPriori provides executive management with a greater ability to set product cost targets and monitor performance against those targets on a real-time basis. By improving the overall speed and sophistication of the product costing process, aPriori enables organization to implementation product cost-reduction initiatives that have greater impact on the financial success of the company. With aPriori, everyone in the organization whose everyday decisions impact product cost knows instantly how the decision they just made had affected the cost. As a result, employees can make more, better informed decisions every day, ultimately drive significant costs out of the products they produce.
Learn how aPriori customers are using real-time product cost information to reduce the cost of the products they produce -- download an aPriori customer case study.