aPriori & CNH

Profitability through DTC at Scale

CNH is a global manufacturer of equipment used in agriculture and construction. The Harvesting global product platform uses aPriori to design parts and assemblies for their combines, headers, and harvesters that get to market faster while surpassing standards for product cost.

How To Design to Cost at Scale: Achieve Profitable Products Faster

CNH uses aPriori to focus its entire engineering team on product cost, so that they can design profitable products faster and take advantage of DTC at scale.

Watch the CNH Case Study video

Watch the interview with the Product Line VP, John Haupt, VP of Harvesting Product Platforms, CNH

User Interview: How aPriori Helps the Product Line VP Deliver Customer Value and Achieve Profitability

 aPriori gives the CNH team the data that they need to identify parts that are cost outliers. These are the parts that the sourcing team spends its precious time addressing with suppliers. Based on the data from aPriori, sourcing can start a conversation with the supplier to collaborate in optimizing the part, whether it’s reducingt materials, or identifying an alternative manufacturing process that reduces cycle time.

The aPriori data also helps ensure that suppliers can reach their margin to be sustainable, which leads to win-win collaboration with suppliers.

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

User Interview: How aPriori Helps the Design to Value Engineer Discover $9 million in Savings

The strategic goal of CNH’s Design to Value team is to promote cost awareness throughout the product life cycle, not just at the end or when a product is released. The benefit of aPriori for Design to Value is that all members of the engineering team, not just value engineering, get cost awareness right from the concept phase.

After using aPriori for Design to Value for over one year, CNH identified almost $9 million of cost savings opportunities.

Watch the video with Design to Value Methodologist, Hemant Gawade, responsible for Product Cost Tools Management at CNH

Watch the video with CNH’s Global Chief Engineer for Combine Header, Ryan Figgins

User Interview: How aPriori Helps the Chief Engineer Reduce Design Churn

Without on-demand insights into the cost of parts and assemblies in the design process, Design teams constantly face the pressure of redesigns to meet product cost targets. With aPriori, this design churn no longer saps time and energy away from designers. Design teams can focus on innovating without the headache of redesigns, and products get released profitably and on time.

 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

User Interview: How aPriori Helps the Design Engineers Speed Up Product Design with Cost and Manufacturability Feedback

Design iterations that used to take CNH Design Engineers upwards of 40 hours of work now take only a few minutes in aPriori. The results are not only time savings, but parts can be half as expensive to produce.

aPriori also protects design engineers from mistakes that would make their parts unmanufacturable.

User Interview: How aPriori Helps the Design Engineers Speed Up Product Design with Cost and Manufacturability Feedback

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

Take the Next Step

Global manufacturers rely on us to reach new heights across profitability, sustainability, and other priorities. Contact us today to see a custom demo using your parts, and explore how to achieve your unique goals.

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