A Virtual Production Environment (VPE) represents a manufacturing facility by defining a set of virtual machines, workcenters, processes, process routings, and process groups. This representation includes definitions of the physical aspects of the environment (speeds, feeds, manufacturing times) as well as cost structure (labor rates, overheads, and so forth). Often, all of the elements of a VPE would be in one physical location, analogous to a factory. However, this may vary from customer to customer.

aPriori provides a set of Starting Point ("baseline") VPEs representing average costs of manufacturing in various geographic regions. You (or aPriori Professional Services) may also configure a VPE to represent your in-house manufacturing environment and cost structure, or a supplier’s manufacturing environment and cost structure.

Updating and maintaining your company's VPEs requires at least one individual to serve as a VPE Administrator: this role has more privileges than a typical aPriori user, but not as many as a System Administrator. This document addresses those tasks that a VPE Administrator might be expected to perform. This document also includes a chapter devoted to administration of the separately-licensed Wire Harness module, since it is implemented as a special VPE (see Chapter 7, Wire Harness and PCBA VPE).