Manufacturing Simulation Technology
Engineers have no insight into potential manufacturability issues as they are detailing their product design concepts in software. By the time your CAD design leaves the engineer’s desk and gets in front of your cost engineer, weeks have passed. Your designer is working on other projects while your cost engineer sends the original design back for modifications that will reduce product cost.
This creates “churn” at the end of the design lifecycle and has the potential to hold up a product launch. Manufacturing Simulation digitizes this process so you can identify and eliminate potential manufacturability problems early in the design lifecycle. This reduces the number of late stage ECOs and lets you more consistently launch new products to market on time.
The Digital Factory
A digital factory perfectly replicates the capabilities of a real world, physical manufacturing facility in software. It includes raw materials that you would use at the factory, all the machines you might have at a factory (including all the performance statistics and tooling of these machines), the labor required to run the machines, all the logic of your manufacturing lines and how a product progresses through primary and secondary processes to yield a finished product, all the overhead costs of running the factory, and more.
Benchmark digital factories are available out of the box representing the cost structures of nearly 100 manufacturing regions around the world. Digital factories allow you to very quickly assess manufacturability of a new product design at any point in the design lifecycle so you can identify and eliminate potential issues that may prevent you from launching your new product to market on time and on budget.
Design for Manufacturing
In the world of discrete product manufacturing, the cost of goods sold can often reach 85-90% of revenue. COGS has a significant impact on the overall profitability of new product initiatives (NPI) and the company overall
Design for Manufacturing is the practice of considering the manufacturing cost of a NPI early in the design lifecycle so you can avoid potential manufacturability issues that will negatively impact profit margins and time to market.
aPriori’s Digital Manufacturing Simulation software helps you do just that. Import your 3D CAD model into aPriori at any point in the lifecycle, and the software can quickly identify potential problems in your design and provide guidance to your engineers on how to quickly eliminate those problems long before you release the new design to manufacturing.