Basic workflow for sharing data
This example explains the workflow between two sites of the same manufacturing company or between a manufacturer and their contract engineering firm). For the purposes of this explanation, it is assumed that the Manufacturer is located in the US and the Contract Engineering Firm is located in India.
1 An engineer in the US initiates a work order for costing a set of parts. This is typically 10 -50 parts but could be up to 100.
2 An engineer in India executes the work order by costing the parts in aPriori.
3 An engineer in India saves each part as a new scenario, gives the scenario a unique name, and makes the scenario ‘official’. *
Note: The scenario name must not contain a colon.
4 On a periodic basis, or when the work order is complete, an engineer in India creates a rollup and adds all the scenarios in the work order into the rollup.**
5 An engineer in India exports the rollup from aPriori which creates a file on disk. This will be a menu option from the aPriori user interface.
6 The exported file is made available to users in the US. This could be done by simply being placed in a shared folder to which users in both the US and India users have access.
7 A user in the US imports the file using aPriori.
*The naming convention is to be determined by the aPriori customer. The purpose for the unique scenario is so that it does not overwrite data in the US database if the part already exists there (unless that is the desired behavior). Note that the scenario name must not contain a colon.
**The timing of when the export is done is to be determined by the aPriori customer. When adding parts to the rollup, parts can be added based on a date range, VPE, or the user ID of the person who last saved the part, among others. There is a practical limit to the number of parts that can be placed in a rollup and exported. The exact number depends on the computer being used and the complexity of the parts in the rollup. On a typical 32-bit workstation, it should handle 100 parts without problem. This number is increased significantly by using a 64-bit workstation and increasing the amount of installed memory.
The file transfer mechanism works in either direction. Therefore, if a user in the US makes changes to a part and wants a user in India to see those changes, the US user can export it, and the India user can import it.