The Bulk Costing & Analysis utility can simultaneously cost multiple component scenarios, and it can also cost assemblies along with all of their child components (“deep” costing). When you use this facility from the main UI, aPriori pre-populates fields with values from the component(s) you selected.

This means that you can use the Bulk Costing & Analysis tool to generate multiple “what-if” scenarios for a component within a single batch run, making it much easier and faster to compare alternative manufacturing scenarios. For example, you could quickly generate cost estimates for manufacturing a part at two different volume levels, in each of 3 locations by specifying a distinct scenario name to store for each distinct set of Bulk Costing inputs and results.

To use the Bulk Costing & Analysis utility from the main aPriori UI, use the Cost menu (see Using the Cost menu on page 1).

You can also bulk cost scenarios and assemblies from the separately-licensed Bulk Loader available from the Tools > Bulk Costing & Analysis menu option, or from the command line. In these cases, rather than selecting components in the main aPriori UI, you populate the fields directly in the Bulk Costing & Analysis user interface, or through a User Inputs spreadsheet in either Excel or CSV format.

Regardless of how you use access the bulk costing functionality, scenario and assembly support is the same.

For costing different scenarios, see Scenario support fields on page 1.

For deep costing assemblies see the next section.