CNH uses aPriori to focus their entire engineering team on product cost, so that they can design profitable products faster and take advantage of DTC at scale.
This year we have seen almost about 9 million cost opportunities that we identified.
Rather than designing and testing first, and then figuring out that we’re missing a cost target, it’s [good] to know that small tweaks can be made early on in the design process to make sure that we achieve that cost target before we go into the expense of validating the parts.
I had this idea to use a, weld assembly. “Let’s have six parts to support this muffler piece”, you know, and that costed maybe a $100, and I spent maybe a couple weeks trying to take out using this tool, and I took out I think like $20, in maybe 40 hours. And then someone was like, “well, what if you use a casting?” I was like, “well, that’s going to be more expensive” – “well, try it in aPriori.” I used it in aPriori, and it resulted to maybe a $50 part, I believe. So it was able to cut out half of the cost there.
With the automated costing, we’re automating the cost of process as we’re designing parts that we don’t have time to touch every single one manually, and have a live cost roll up of our system keys… so that we know that this system key is below target. This system key over here is above target. But overall, from a product standpoint, we’re right where we need to be.
With the aPriori tool, you as the design engineer can be costing your parts as you design them, not getting all the designs done, and then giving it to the costing team, only to find out that you missed your cost target and we need to redesign.
