How CNH Uses Automation to Accelerate Product Development, Saving Millions with aPriori’s Design To Cost

Key Takeaways:

• Today’s manufacturers have to accelerate product development while ensuring DFM and controlling costs, including expensive rework, in order to remain competitive, innovative, and profitable
• CNH embeds aPriori’s cost analysis early in the design phase—when engineering decisions have the greatest impact on a product’s total cost
• The result is enterprise-wide design-to-cost alignment, driving scalable results while accelerating time to market and keeping costs in line

The Full Article

For engineering executives at large, complex manufacturing organizations, accelerating product development while controlling costs is a constant challenge.

CNH, a global leader in agricultural and construction equipment, operates on a massive scale in a highly competitive market where cost control, speed to market, and product quality directly impact profitability. To meet these demands, CNH leverages aPriori’s Manufacturing Intelligence to embed cost intelligence early in product design—when engineering decisions have the greatest influence on total product cost.

By shifting cost analysis upstream, CNH enables engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing leaders to align around cost targets before designs are locked in, helping the organization deliver profitable products faster. Moreover, aPriori for Design to Value ensures that all members of the engineering team are fully cost-aware from the concept phase onward.

“We identified nearly $9 million in cost savings opportunities by using aPriori to evaluate designs earlier and make more informed cost decisions.”
— Hemant Gawade, Product Cost Tools Management, CNH

Early Cost Visibility for Engineering and Manufacturing Leaders

One of the biggest barriers to cost reduction is late-stage cost discovery. aPriori addresses this by giving engineers and sourcing teams real-time visibility into part, assembly, and manufacturing costs directly within the design process. With immediate insight into cost drivers, CNH teams can identify cost issues, compare alternative design scenarios, and assess manufacturability without waiting on manual cost estimates or supplier feedback.

This early cost transparency enables engineering leaders to make data-driven trade-off decisions, reduce downstream rework, and ensure designs are optimized for both performance and cost from the start.

Enabling Design‑to‑Value at Enterprise Scale

As part of CNH’s enterprise-wide Design to Value strategy, aPriori provides a consistent, data-driven foundation for cost management across global programs and product lines. It does so by identifying cost outliers in parts that the sourcing team dedicates significant time to addressing with suppliers.

With aPriori data in hand, sourcing can initiate a dialogue with a supplier to take a more collaborative approach to optimizing a part – be it through material reduction or identification of an alternative manufacturing process to reduce cycle time. Consequently, suppliers can achieve sustainable margins as well, ensuring that both the manufacturer and the supplier benefit from aPriori’s data.

Using accurate digital manufacturing cost models, CNH identified nearly $9 million in potential cost savings while providing cross-functional teams with a shared source of truth for cost data throughout the product lifecycle.

For multi-billion‑dollar manufacturers, this approach enables leadership teams to standardize cost-informed decision-making, improve collaboration between engineering and sourcing, and scale best practices across the organization.

“Our farmers are under continuous pressure for their input costs, and one of those significant input costs is the price of our machines. So, our responsibility as partners with our farmers is to have cost-effective products that they can buy. And that’s where aPriori comes in, helping make sure that the parts that we buy that go into our machines are being delivered efficiently, that they are designed efficiently right from the start, and that we can collaborate with our suppliers to get to the right cost levels and have a win-win with our suppliers.”—John Haupt, VP, Harvesting Product Platforms, CNH

Faster Design Iterations, Shorter Time to Market

Real-time cost insights of parts and assemblies are critical in the design stage. Without them, design teams are under constant pressure to redesign these parts and assemblies to meet product cost targets. aPriori eliminates this design churn, saving time and resources. Now, design teams can innovate more because the redesign barrier has been removed, and products can be launched on time and profitably.

Beyond cost reduction, aPriori significantly improves engineering productivity and development speed. Design iterations that used to take days or weeks can now be completed in minutes, allowing teams to evaluate more options earlier in the design cycle. This capability helps reduce late-stage design changes, shorten development process timelines, and accelerate time-to-market for new products.

By empowering engineers with immediate manufacturing and cost feedback, CNH increases agility while maintaining control over product cost and quality.

“Design churn takes a lot of effort that I’m not sure everybody fully realizes because you’ve designed the part, you’ve developed the supply chain for the part, and you’ve gone through the entire effort of tooling the part and the validation of the part. And at product launch, for not meeting the business needs for that product, now we have to do a cost reduction project where we have to reinvest all that same amount of time to get the part or get the system down to the cost target. So, we’re redoing all of that work again, which means that we’re not putting that effort into developing new products that will benefit our customers in other ways. With aPriori, we don’t have to spend that time in design churn.”—Ryan Figgins, Global Chief Engineer for Combine Headers, CNH

Measurable Impact on Product Cost and Profitability with Design To Cost

Design engineers cannot afford to expend unnecessary hours creating products. In CNH’s case, engineers were spending up to 40 hours on such designs. With aPriori, they now take just minutes to develop. Time is saved, and parts and assemblies become much less expensive to produce.

By aligning engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing teams around shared cost targets, CNH uses aPriori to drive measurable business impact. CNH uses aPriori to focus its entire engineering team on product cost. As a result, products can be designed more quickly for higher profit margins, and design-to-cost can be leveraged at scale.

The result is reduced design errors, more manufacturable products, faster development times, lower costs, and improved profitability—without sacrificing innovation or performance.

For engineering executives at large manufacturing enterprises, CNH’s success demonstrates how digital manufacturing intelligence can transform product design, enable design‑to‑cost strategies, and deliver sustainable competitive advantage.

Transform Product Design with Cost Intelligence

For engineering and manufacturing leaders looking to accelerate product development while reducing product costs, CNH’s success with aPriori demonstrates what’s possible when cost intelligence is embedded in the early design process.

Discover how aPriori can help your organization

Today, organizations must move faster, control costs earlier, and make smarter design decisions to stay ahead. aPriori empowers companies with actionable manufacturing intelligence during product development—when the greatest opportunities for cost savings and performance improvements exist. By embedding real-time cost intelligence into the design process, aPriori helps teams make confident, data-driven decisions from concept through production.

• Shorten design cycles and accelerate time to market
• Identify and eliminate cost drivers early in product development
• Enable design‑to‑cost (DTC) and design‑to‑value (DTV) strategies at enterprise scale
• Align engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing around shared cost targets

By reducing design cycles, eliminating cost drivers early, and enabling enterprise-wide adoption of design-to-cost and design-to-value strategies, aPriori aligns engineering, sourcing, and manufacturing around shared objectives. The result is faster innovation, lower product costs, and a stronger competitive advantage.

“If there are holes too close to the edge of a sheet metal part, aPriori will watch out for features that can’t be manufactured and that has been very useful.” —Mitchell Bast, Design Engineer, CNH