Costing with CAD Properties
Your aPriori system administrator may have configured your system to automatically extract properties or parameters from the CAD file and map those values to aPriori production inputs or User Defined Attributes (UDAs). If your CAD parts contain all the information that aPriori needs to successfully perform a costing (Process Group, VPE, Material , and Annual Volume), it is now possible to cost a part as soon as you open it, without the need for manually entering such information in aPriori. If you perform a role such as Design Engineer, this allows you to concentrate on part design and cost parts without worrying about production details that might be outside of your area of expertise.
Note: You should still review any automatically-populated inputs to ensure that they seem reasonable for the part you are costing.
This section concentrates on the production inputs that can be automatically mapped from CAD properties. Additional details and capabilities such as mapping to UDAs are discussed in the aPriori Professional
System Administration Guide. The discussions in this section concentrate on the aPriori Professional user interface, but also apply to Bulk Costing (see
Bulk Costing and Analysis).
If this feature is implemented for your installation, you should be aware of the following changes from an installation where automatic CAD property extraction is not implemented:
• Fields in the Cost Guide may be automatically set and updated without the need for you to manually enter values.
• Properties that change in the CAD file may cause a
Reconcile Inputs window to pop up, to allow you to tell aPriori whether to accept the new values or continue to use previously-entered aPriori values. For more information, see
Reconcile Inputs below.
When the values for aPriori fields are initially supplied from CAD properties, you can override those values in aPriori to explore the cost impact of different manufacturing scenarios. Once you override a production input that is mapped to a CAD property, your override value continues to be used for subsequent costings unless it is cleared. There are two ways to clear the override:
• By using the
Cost Overrides Summary dialog (see
Working with the Overrides Summary dialog)
• By using the Reconcile Inputs dialog (see the following section).