To validate your initial costing
aPriori recommends that you validate your results, especially when first getting started with wire harness costing. This means manually checking the number of components in the assembly against the number of components listed on your wire harness drawing and/or output tables.
1 Go to the Assembly Details tab and scroll horizontally to the Custom Outputs columns. (We recommend closing the Cost Guide and the Messages panel to provide the maximum space to the Assembly Details tab. Then use the table icons to expand the entries and size all the columns to their contents.)
2 Under the Assembly Process, examine the Output Value column and compare the quantities there to the quantities in your wire harness output tables and/or schematics. This step ensures that the Transformation Utility correctly processed all of the components in your harness design. So, for example, if your wire harness design tables call for 114 machine crimped contacts and the aPriori Assembly Details table shows only 102, you need to track down why 12 are missing. Or if the wire harness has some number of manual crimped wire ferrules and the Assembly Details table shows none, you need to find out why a process has been skipped over.
The long term, correct solution is to track down the errors, run the Transformation Utility again, re-load the BOM, and re-cost. However, if you are just learning how to cost wire harnesses, or if you are under a deadline, you can temporarily override the Output Values to correct quantities.
Common errors that can result in discrepancies include:
• something is not typed correctly
• the component is missing from the Component Library (or it exists in the library but does not have a price, or is missing a type designation)
3 Another adjustment that you can make would be to add additional operations that might not be called out explicitly on the original BOM. For example, labeling operations might not be in the BOM and therefore would not automatically show up in the Assembly Details tab. To manually add such an operation, bring up the Routing Selection editor by selecting the assembly and clicking Edit > Routing Selection in the Manufacturing Process panel). Add the missing process and adjust the quantity in the Process Setting Options. (For more information, see the "Selecting a process routing" section of the aPriori User Guide.
Once you have successfully imported your wire harness, validated it, and obtained a reasonable initial costing, you can proceed to use it in aPriori in much the same way you would work with a geometry-based assembly and its component parts.