Deep costing assemblies

“Deep costing” an assembly means costing the assembly and all of its child components. aPriori visits and costs every component of the assembly, including sub-assemblies. The total cost is calculated as the sum of the costs of all sub-components.

Note: If you specified an optional Rollup Name for output when defining the Bulk Cost Group, the roll-up will NOT include components at the top level if they are sub-components of costed assemblies. They are already included or displayed as children of costed assemblies.

To deep cost an assembly from the main aPriori user interface, open the assembly and select Cost > Deep Cost Scenario. This brings up the Bulk Cost & Analysis user interface, pre-populated default values for the assembly. Edit the fields as necessary and click the Cost button.

To deep cost an assembly as a Bulk Cost group, select Tools > Bulk Cost & Analysis and follow the same general procedures described in User inputs files on page 1 for other bulk costing operations. Ensure that the Deep Cost checkbox is checked

You must ensure that the Bulk Loader is provided with either or both of the following:

• A directory containing the top-level CAD assembly file to be costed, as well as the CAD files for all of the assembly’s sub-components. This is most likely when costing new assemblies that have not been costed before. If a User Inputs file is not provided (see below), default values will be used for costing.

• User Inputs file in either Excel or CSV (comma-separated values) format, containing sub-components with user-defined values rather than default values for costing. This is useful for re-costing assembly scenarios with different user options for comparison analysis. You can create assembly scenarios using the Bulk Loader, but you cannot define the structure of the assembly. You can only specify various user options for the assembly scenario.

Deep cost behavior

Deep-costing of an assembly tree takes place from the leaves up and occurs in two passes to ensure cost accuracy:

• Pass 1 analyzes the structure of the assembly (that is, it identifies the sub-components).

• Pass 2 costs the assembly after all the sub-components are costed.

If a component scenario belongs to more than one assembly, the component scenario will be costed once.

If a component scenario is set to "ignore", the component scenario will not be costed even if it is a sub-component of a deep costing assembly.

For a multi-level assembly, a sub-assembly will be deep-costed automatically if its parent is deep-cost enabled, even if the sub-assembly is not deep cost enabled. This allows you to deep-cost an assembly recursively without needing to know the exact structure of the top-level assembly or the deep-cost setting of its sub-assemblies.

Deep cost status

When deep costing an assembly and all of its children, the Bulk Costing user interface displays the following messages in the Status column. Note that these apply only to assembly deep-costing operations.

• Processing First Pass... - The Bulk Loader is analyzing the assembly to determine its structure.

• First Pass Success - The Bulk Loader has completed its analysis of the assembly structure.

• Processing Second Pass... - The Bulk Loader has costed all sub-components of the assembly and is now completing the assembly costing operation.