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aPriori Announces its Fifth Manufacturing Insights Patent

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 | April 25, 2023
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Key Takeaways:

  • aPriori continues to deliver patented innovations for manufacturing insights
  • aPriori’s new patent provides manufacturing cost and DFM insights at new levels of speed and scale

The Full Article:

Product teams face constant challenges to innovate and optimize products for manufacturability, sustainability, and profit. But refining components for cost and DFM is often completed manually. This time-consuming process causes delays and misses opportunities to reduce cost because product development teams often don’t have the insights or the staff to analyze all parts and components effectively.

aPriori addresses these challenges by providing automated manufacturing insights at scale and delivers proactive alerts for product design teams to review potential design issues quickly and efficiently. And aPriori continues to innovate and bring novel capabilities to market. To underscore this point, the United States Patent and Trademark Office recently awarded aPriori its fifth patent. The latest U.S. patent addresses bulk costing, which enables product development teams to assess the cost of multiple parts simultaneously. Bulk costing produces fast, detailed business insights that assist cost teams in identifying cost-cutting opportunities across all product designs.

Patented Bulk Costing Solution Streamlines Operations

The number of product parts that cost engineers must estimate and analyze is daunting – especially when considering labor shortages and the requirement to review multiple design iterations for a single component. And the reliance on manual spreadsheets to manage this process increases the probability of inaccurate results and higher costs.

The aPriori Manufacturing Insights Platform includes bulk costing automation to provide users with precise product cost analysis for labor, material, and indirect and direct overhead costs. Additionally, sourcing and design teams benefit from bulk costing as well.

Cost engineers can zero in on current component prices and then compare them to bulk costing’s should-cost projection. Sourcing can then use this data to better negotiate with suppliers, saving significantly on key components. Design engineers can reduce engineering change orders (ECOs) and improve time to market, identifying design to cost (DTC) and design for manufacturing (DFM) issues. One customer took eight hours to conduct VAVE for one part. The customer then was able to cost 100 parts in one hour and conduct 30 VAVE analyses over four hours.

Run Multiple Production Scenarios to Get Detailed Insights Quickly

Additionally, the matrix costing capability within bulk costing enables users to simultaneously create a series of scenarios to determine the most efficient DTC and DFM processes within a single workflow.

To run a simulation with matrix costing, cost engineers make three production inputs: factory locations, batch sizes, and annual volumes. Then they use aPriori to automatically compare and identify the most efficient manufacturing process routing. For instance, you may have 11 routings in your digital factory. By altering certain parameters and using bulk costing, aPriori will consistently select the optimal one to reduce expenses. The production scenario combinations are automatically evaluated by matrix costing to produce detailed cost reports to determine the best cost option.

Delve deeper into the power of bulk costing.

Building on a Foundation of Innovation

In 2021, aPriori was awarded an exclusive patent for its revolutionary design for manufacturability technology. It enables manufacturers to improve product profitability and accelerate time to market. Identifying and eliminating expensive cost drivers early in the product lifecycle also can reduce unnecessary ECOs. Additionally, aPriori currently has filed a provisional patent for sustainability and has another patent pending for its aP Generate product.

This latest manufacturing insights patent underscores aPriori’s mission of providing manufacturers with solutions that streamline production, reduce costs, improve manufacturability, and accelerate time to market. Products such as bulk costing highlight how small changes equal money saved.

Need More Convincing into the Power of aPriori?

Forrester confirms that aPriori provides 603% ROI based on a 3-year, risk-adjusted present value.
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