Decoding aPriori: Top 10 Tips for Maximizing Your Efficiency

Thomas Hazley: Hello and welcome to Decoding aPriori. Top 10 tips from Maximizing Your Efficiency. My name is Thomas Hazley and I am the Senior Training Applications Engineer at aPriori. In today’s session, we will cover some well-known and maybe some not so well-known tips on how to use aPriori more efficiently. There is something here for all use cases and in fact, there are more than ten, but I’ll mention that later on.

Real-Time Insights

TH: First up is the cost ticker mode. Like I said, there are plenty of tips for different use cases and the first one is around the design engineer use case. As the design engineer, for example working on concept stage, you can use direct integration from your CAD package to cost a part and in aP Pro to get real-time cost insights while designing. Direct integration can be used with Creo, NX, Catia and SolidWorks. For this example, I am using Creo. So the part shown here, you can see in the bottom corner is a cost ticker mode, which is available when you use aP Pro with direct integration.

TH: This lets you see the cost change as you make changes to your design. When you open up a new part, it has to be initialized in aP Pro first, which does require you to open aPriori Pro, which you can do from the cost ticker by clicking switch to full view. Once this is done, however, you can come back to your CAD package and you can see that there is a fully burdened cost and a cost breakdown. For this part, you want to change the design to add a hole to the top. When you do this and save your CAD model, the AP ticker will turn gray, in in the same way your cost guide and aP Pro turns gray, to let you know there have been some un-costed changes.

TH: Click cost in the cost ticker and aPriori re-costs the part. It selects the lowest cost routing for this part with the new feature and uses the directional arrows to show whether there has been an increase or decrease in the values. The second tip is around displaying additional decimal places. Everyone is used to this as their cost summary or part details tab view, but what if you want some more detail in the numbers?

Part Details Tab

TH: You can go to the view menu and select unit system settings where you can change the number of decimal places, but also the units displayed as well, if you wish. For this presentation, the number of decimal places has changed to four, you can see the cost cycle time and finished mass, et cetera are all updated. Our next tip applies to any tables that you can see in aPriori. You are probably used to working in, for example, a part details tab.

TH: This is a typical part detailed view in aP Pro. Any of the plus icons can be clicked to expand that one set of columns, but if you hover just below the edit dropdown menu, you can see the one click all columns control appear. The first of these icons will let you expand all the rows as you can see here, the third one across lets you expand all the columns, but as you can see, not all the text is visible. You can automatically resize all columns by clicking on the last icon. If you want to collapse all the columns back to the default view, you can click the fourth icon and to collapse all the rows, click on the second icon. Our next tip is really useful if you are used to costing a lot of common component types, and this can include secondary processes as well.

Cost Guide

TH: In the cost guide, you have a dropdown menu for recently used settings. You can select your common part from that dropdown list and confirm the copy process. This will change all the entries in the cost guide to match the process group, digital factory, secondary processes, material, annual volume, and even additional company defined attributes such as project codes. We are halfway through and now with matrix costing. This is a really efficient way to create multiple scenarios. It does use aPriori’s bulk costing capability, which is available as part of our Accelerate and Transform packages. It is not available as part of the Discover package. To start matrix costing, from the cost menu select matrix costing. Once you start matrix costing, you can specify different factories, different annual volumes, batch sizes. When you are ready to cost, aPriori utilizes the bulk costing module to cost the different scenarios. Part of the matrix costing process will create a static roll-up of all the costed scenarios that can be easily found after costing.

Dynamic Roll-Ups

TH: In the previous tip, I mentioned a static roll-up. This time I will look at dynamic roll-ups and highlight the two differences between static and dynamic roll-ups. The first is a static roll-up can contain parts, virtual parts, assemblies, and other static roll-ups, whereas a dynamic roll-up cannot contain static roll-ups. The second difference I will demonstrate now with a short video. When you first create a dynamic roll-up, after giving it a name, you have to specify the search criteria for it. If you do not specify anything, it will return all scenarios that have been costed in aP Pro. For this demonstration, the search criteria will be project code X, Y, Z. When you click find, it returns nine scenarios. Click okay to build out this dynamic roll-up and you can see the nine costed scenarios are now added to this. Because this is a dynamic rollup, if you change any scenario to match the search criteria, it will be included in this.

TH: For this example, if you add a project number X, Y, Z to the sheet metal part and cost and save the scenario, this will be included in the dynamic rollup the next time it is opened. If you do have the dynamic rollup open, from the file menu, you can select refresh current scenario from the database, which will interrogate the database again using the search criteria you specified when creating that dynamic roll-up. You can see that the scenario Pedal1_U9 is now included in this dynamic rollup. Everybody loves to have more tabs open than you could ever use, so aPriori helps you to navigate through these with our next tip. From the view menu, you can select show navigation, which let you see all the open items. You can also open costed items directly from here. I have mentioned static roll-ups already, and you can manually add items to these, by using this navigation panel, you can add costed items directly to roll-ups just by clicking and dragging from the open list in the navigation panel into the roll-up panel.

Navigation Panel

TH: And finally, you can use the navigation panel to show you where a costed scenario is used for assemblies, comparisons or roll ups. Our next step revolves around costing an assembly. When you first cost an assembly, if the parts have already been costed, they might have production quantities that do not match the quantities required for that assembly. For simple assemblies like this one on screen, it would not be too much work to go in and adjust those, but if you have a complex assembly, you can use the assembly settings to modify the production information of the parts called out in the BOM.

TH: To do this, click on the scenario menu and select copy assembly inputs to children. You can select all or just the relevant inputs to copy to the children. For this example, I have left all options selected. AP Pro copies the inputs to the children, and then the next step would be to carry out a deep cost of the assembly and its component parts.

TH: This will change the annual volumes to reflect those needed to fulfill this assembly. This is the first screen of the deep cost scenario screen, and you can see that the annual volume for the components have been adjusted. AP Pro will then cost these items using the updated annual volume to determine the lowest cost routings available. This updates the annual volume in the manufacturing information column to match what was selected using the quantity for each item multiplied by the annual volume to achieve this updated volume. So earlier, I showed a pretty simple assembly, but there will be a time when you get a much more complex assembly and you want to try and navigate through the parts in the BOM. To help you do this, there are two options provided by aPriori. These are hide and ignore, and depending on which you select, depends if you effect the fully burden cost or not.

TH: The first option is to hide the part, and you can see from the video that when you select the part in the component viewer that the component is highlighted in the viewer, but also in the assembly details tab, you want to be able to see the items below this engine cover, so right click on the component name in the assembly details tab, then click hide, and you will notice that the component is removed from the component viewer.

Fully-Burdened Cost

TH: Notice that the assembly details entry is grayed out, but there is no change to the fully burdened cost. To make the part visible again, right click on the name and click undo hide, which restores the component viewer and assembly details tab back to the original view. The second option is to ignore a part. To demonstrate this, I will use the existing selected part of engine cover. With the part selected, right click and select ignore, which will hide the component in the viewer, but will also strike it through in the BOM and remove the cost from the fully burdened cost of the assembly. To make this part be visible again and to include its cost in the fully burdened cost, click undo, ignore.

TH: A good example of why you’d want to use this to ignore options is maybe that the component is part of the assembly model for visualization only, or it’s an optional part that isn’t included in this BOM, but you don’t want to make permanent changes to the CAD BOM. Number 10 in our top 10 tips for increasing efficiency takes us back to the user role of design engineer. You are working on a new welded assembly that is similar to an existing assembly. It is quite similar and maybe just the lengths are a bit different.

TH: What aPriori lets you do is to copy weld information from a previous costed part with weld. To do this from the scenario menu. Click copy welds from and do a search for the existing parts that you want to copy the welds from. aPriori then uses that information and creates the virtual welds and creates a weld analysis report that you can save and then view.

Reports

TH: This report gives you information on the number of welds and what was changed for the new virtual welds. Or highlights if there is anything missed during the copy process. You can see for this assembly that welds one and two, there has been a change in position or length, while weld three has been copied successfully with no change to length or position. You can now see an updated cost and view of the part showing the virtual welds and the impact that it has had on the fully burdened cost.

TH: There are many more tips and tricks, and if you want to know more, there is another session that covers how to create a custom process. This session is called Unleashing the Power of Digital Factories.