Cost Model Overview
The aPriori Wire Harness Process Group provides the ability to automatically cost wire harnesses of moderate complexity .
To do this, aPriori requires three simple inputs:
• Outputs from your wire harness design tool in a standardized, .csv format.
• A component type identifier for each part number, such as "Termination", "Wire", "Connector", etc.
• Standard prices for purchased components, wires, braids, etc. This is typically in the form of a Compon ent Library that is set up by an aPriori administrator, mapping Customer Part Numbers and Manufacturer Part Numbers.
If you are an engineer designing a wire harness, you can generate your drawings and then generate .csv output tables to check your costs immediately, allowing you to make design decisions now rather than weeks later when receiving supplier quotes.
If you work in purchasing, you can analyze your wire harness costs at a component level, and start to negotiate from a more knowledgeable position with your suppliers.
Note: The separately-licensed Wire Harness Process Group is somewhat different than other aPriori process groups: it is implemented as a VPE that your administrator(s) import and configure for the users at your site. This VPE consists of two process groups that have been customized for wire harness costing: Assembly, and User Guided. aPriori also provides a "transformation utility" for converting the output from your wire harness design system into a consistent format that can be read by aPriori. You do not really need to be concerned with these architectural details, since aPriori configures the Wire Harness cost model specifically for your company, and provides an easy-to-use interface to walk you through the costing process.
Wire harnesses are considered a type of assembly, but geometric cost drivers (GCDs) are not available the same way they would be for CAD model-based components. Cost drivers are provided via attributes from standard wire harness definition tables
Instead of depending on CAD model GCDs, aPriori extracts cost driver information from standard tables generated by the wire harness design tools, typically in the form of ".csv" files. Users augment the information from these imported files with user-guided data, and with component library information. Most components will be off-the-shelf parts, but we know that many companies specify internal part numbers rather than manufacturer or distributor part numbers. To associate information from the tables to the purchased component information, aPriori Professional Services first maps your internal part numbers to manufacturer or distributor part numbers in a Component Library in the VPE.
This chapter covers day-to-day costing operations and assumes that aPriori Professional Services has worked with your administrators to set up and configure this cost model, including the Component Library. See the aPriori System Administration Guide and VPE Administration Guide for more information about configuration and maintenance of the Wire Harness and PCBA environments.
aPriori does not make any assumptions about which specific wire harness design tool is being used: it could range from a standard CAD tool such as PTC Pro/ENGINEER, to a dedicated wire harness tool such as Zuken E3.series, to a drawing tool such as AutoCAD. The one assumption that we do make is that each of these tools can output most of the inputs that aPriori requires, into a consistent .csv table format. aPriori takes these tables and processes them through a data transformation tool which creates a spreadsheet that can be read by the aPriori BOM loader for the Wire Harness process group.