Collaboration and Usability
As of Releases 2016 R2 and 2017 R1, aPriori Professional has added a number of new fields and features that can be used to better manage the process of preparing and refining a cost estimate, and to facilitate collaboration between multiple users. These features are reflected in Cost Insight Design.
• Scenario Notes – The Notes toolbar button (
) opens a Scenario Notes dialog through which users can enter and save text notes. The Notes field is intended to support collaboration between different users working on the same scenario. As users work with a scenario, they can add notes about decisions, changes, or any questions regarding the scenario. Other users -- both in aPriori Professional and Cost Insight Design -- then can access the notes and respond as appropriate. Notes can be saved without requiring the part to be re-costed.
) opens a Scenario Notes dialog through which users can enter and save text notes. The Notes field is intended to support collaboration between different users working on the same scenario. As users work with a scenario, they can add notes about decisions, changes, or any questions regarding the scenario. Other users -- both in aPriori Professional and Cost Insight Design -- then can access the notes and respond as appropriate. Notes can be saved without requiring the part to be re-costed. • Assignee -- Each scenario has an attribute called Assignee, providing a way to assign cost estimation tasks to individual users. This field is available both in the Cost Guide and the Administrative Info dialog. You may select the Assignee from a drop-down list of aPriori users at your company. To find scenarios assigned to yourself or other users, select FileèOpen to invoke the Search dialog and enter the desired username in the Assignee field. Alternately, you can make a Dynamic Roll Up which will return all scenarios assigned to the user of interest. The assignee field can be updated and saved without re-costing.
• A Last Assigned Time field also is available, but this field currently is not updated automatically. You can manually edit the time stamp when changing the Assignee field, if you wish to track when the assignee changed. aPriori plans to populate this time stamp field automatically when the Assignee value is changed in a future release.
• Status and Cost Maturity – these two fields allow a user to indicate the current state of a scenario, which can be used for tracking and reporting purposes or to implement a basic collaboration process for reviewing and refining cost estimates as design, manufacturing, and sourcing decisions are made. These fields are available both in the Cost Guide and the Administrative Info dialog. In Release 2017 R1 the possible values of these fields are hardcoded but will be configurable in a future release. Status currently can be left blank or set to New, (Under)Analysis, Waiting, Complete, or Closed. Cost Maturity currently can be left blank or set to Initial, Low, Medium, or High. The Status and Cost Maturity fields can be updated and saved without re-costing.