Bulk Costing Usage Reports (System Admins)

The Bulk Costing and Analysis module provides a script-based Bulk Costing Usage Report to help you analyze how Bulk Costing and Analysis is being used within your organization.

Note: This section is intended primarily for aPriori System Administrators. You must have write permission to the aPriori installation to configure and run these reports.

The Bulk Costing Usage Report captures Bulk Cost Events, whether they were initiated through the Bulk Costing & Analysis user interface (via the Tools > Bulk Costing and Analysis menu item) or through the command-line script (see Running from the Command Line). The report also includes Cost Events which are the total number of cost events generated through the aPriori Windows Client UI and the Bulk Costing & Analysis module.

Bulk Cost Events, Cost Events and the number of Scenarios created are tracked by end-user license.

Notes:

• Your company needs to be licensed to use the Bulk Costing and Analysis module.

• The final count of various events will not be saved until you exit aPriori. For example, if you bulk cost 24 parts and immediately run a usage report, you might see only 20 bulk cost events recorded. If you exit aPriori and then rerun the report, you will see all 24 bulk cost events reported,

This report is intended for tracking Bulk Costing usage. For general usage tracking to guide and monitor a deployment, aPriori recommends that you use the Scenario Activity and Usage Report available in aPriori Cost Insight. These dashboards and reports have more detail on costing activity, including costing trends over time, details on specific components cost and the materials, VPEs, process groups and processes used in costing activity. For more information, see the chapter on “Scenario Activity and Usage Reports” in the Cost Insight Guide.

The Bulk Costing Usage Report is run as a command line script, not through the aPriori user interface. There are actually two versions of this script, which both reside in the aPriori installation directory (<aP_install>\bin):

• createUsageReport.cmd – An editable version intended to be run manually.

• createUsageReportCmdLineArgs.cmd – A version intended to be run from another script or as a scheduled task which passes in arguments at run-time.

The two scripts are mostly identical except that the following settings are configured to accept command line arguments in createUsageReportCmdLineArgs.cmd :

• set startDate=%1

• set endDate=%2

• set onlyRecordsAfterLastReport=%3

• set usageReportPath=%~f4

By default, these scripts create reports in <aP_install>\UsageReports.

The rest of this section assumes that you are working with createUsageReport.cmd.

Note: This report only includes Bulk Costing events that are generated using aPriori 2016 R2 or higher. Prior releases of aPriori tracked Cost Events, but did not track Bulk Costing events, so there is no data about them available for reporting purposes.

To configure and run createUsageReport.cmd

1 Navigate to <aP_install>\bin

2 Open createUsageReport.cmd in a text editor.

3 To run the Usage Report for a specified timeframe --Set startDate and endDate values in the form MM/DD/YYYY and make sure onlyRecordsAfterLastReport is set to false.

To run the Usage Report for costing activity since the time the report was generated -- Leave startDate and endDate blank and set onlyRecordsAfterLastReport to true.

Save the file when done.

4 Double-click createUsageReport.cmd to run the report.

The resulting report is created and saved by default in <aP_install>\UsageReports. (You can specify a different target by editing usageReportPath in the .cmd file.)