Assumptions and Limitations for Assembly Molding

The Assembly Molding process group is subject to the following limitations:

• The molded plastic components of an Assembly Molding assembly do not appear in the Assembly Details pane. This is for two reasons:

o The injection molding costs are accounted for as process costs at the assembly level rather than at the plastic component level.

o Excluding the plastic components prevents any standalone scenarios of those components from rolling up into the assembly, effectively double-counting costs for that component. While users are advised not to cost these plastic components as standalone parts since they are in fact molded in the context of the assembly, there is no way to prevent this.

• aPriori requires that the hierarchy of the assembly CAD model correspond to the actual manufacturing order to accurately estimate the cost of an Assembly Molding assembly. In particular, aPriori interprets all the molded components that are at the same level of the assembly hierarchy as being molded simultaneously, in a single mold cavity with the same screw unit. If the CAD model hierarchy structure doesn’t match the manufacturing order, various aspects of the aPriori analysis may be inaccurate including the number of distinct molding operations, the number and size of mold bases, the draw direction(s), parting lines, and number and types of side actions.