Initial costing: The Cost Guide
When you open a component that has never been costed before, aPriori displays the Cost Guide at the left side of the desktop. The Guide is a wizard-like interface, divided into three tabs that guide you to enter the production, tolerance, and machine & process information needed to generate an accurate costing for the component.
The display of the Guide is controlled by the Cost Guide button and the Cost Guide toolbar.
The Cost Guide is displayed when the button is set and is hidden when the button is not set, or when you click the “X” button (
) in the toolbar. (You can also use the View > Show Cost Guide menu option.)
) in the toolbar. (You can also use the View > Show Cost Guide menu option.)Note: The Cost Guide is always displayed when costing a component for the first time, regardless of the setting of the Guidance button.
The Cost Guide is useful not only for initially entering cost inputs but also for refining those inputs. You may wish to leave it open most of the time.
The Cost Guide incorporates and combines features and tools that are found throughout the aPriori GUI and presents them in order in one place so that your initial costing can be more complete and more accurate. Experienced aPriori users will find that many tasks that you formerly performed in different areas of the UI are now much more easily accessed through the Cost Guide. Some of these areas include:
• Production information (otherwise entered on the Production Info tab of the Cost Object window).
• Administration information (otherwise entered on the Administrative Info tab of the Cost Object window).
• Routing choices, presented as a simplified version of the aPriori Routing Selection window (otherwise specified from the Manufacturing Process panel Edit > Routing Selection menu). This simplified version emphasizes primary routing alternatives.
• Secondary process choices such as Heat Treatment or Surface Treatment processes, presented in an easy-to-navigate check-box format (otherwise specified by including these secondary processes within the aPriori Routing Selection window (see Selecting a process routing on page 1).
Note: The reason for this organization of primary routing choices and optional secondary process choices in the Cost Guide is so that you would not be required to go into the full routing editor to add secondary processes. However, this behavior can be customized by a process node attribute -- “displayInSPDialog” -- which administrators can modify in the Cost Model Workbench:
Nodes with the “displayInSPDialog” node attribute set to TRUE will appear in the Secondary Process dialog and NOT be displayed in the Simplified Routing Editor
Nodes with the “displayInSPDialog” node attribute set to FALSE (or not defined at all) WILL appear in the Simplified Routing Editor and not the Secondary Process dialog.
Refer to the node attributes section of the Cost Model Workbench Guide for more information.
• Tolerance policy and/or tolerances on individual GCDs (otherwise specified from the Manufacturing Process panel Edit > Tolerance menu, or from the context menu on individual GCDs in the Geometric Cost Drivers panel).
• Process setup options (otherwise specified from the Manufacturing Process panel Edit > Process Setup Options menu).
• Machine Selection (otherwise specified from the Manufacturing Process panel Edit > Machine Selection menu).
You do not need to provide every possible value to the Cost Guide. In fact, you could perform an initial costing with little or no input to the Cost Guide at all – the Cost Guide will not force you to enter values, although it will prevent you from using the Process and Machine Options tab until the component has been costed at least once. Such a premature costing would not be accurate, but the point is that the Cost Guide is provided to make it obvious what cost factors you should consider, and make it easy for you to specify those inputs that you decide to provide, when you are ready to provide them.
To navigate within the Cost Guide, you can use the Next and Back buttons at the bottom of the window to proceed to the next logical tab or to return to the previous one. You can also proceed directly to a specific tab by selecting the tab labels at the top of the window.
Note: At any time, you can see the inputs you have provided to the Cost Guide by going to the Manufacturing Process panel in the aPriori desktop and clicking Edit > Cost Overrides Summary. You can also reverse all your overrides from here by clicking the Clear All Overrides button at the bottom of the window. For more information about the Cost Overrides Summary window, see Working with the Overrides Summary dialog on page 1.
The following sections will step you through the various Cost Guide tabs and fields.