Improving Time to Value with aPriori

LA: I am here with Neel Gupte from Dover Food Retail. Neel, just tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do for your work.

NG: Well, I have been with Dover Food Retail for about a year and a half. I’m the Vice President of Engineering there. And Dover Food Retail is primarily engaged in commercial refrigeration. We make refrigerated equipment for the supermarket industry.

LA: And so you’re here today at aPriori’s conference. What problem are you having that you’re looking to aPriori to try to solve?

NG: We are currently in the process of purchasing some software from aPriori and I have prior experience with aPriori. So basically the problem we are trying to solve is accelerate our design to value, our time to value (TTV), and the cost reduction programs to the point where we can become more profitable.

LA: And at the previous companies that you worked, were you able to accelerate design to value using aPriori in a certain amount of time?

NG: Yes. So in the previous companies, we used aPriori in various manners, not only for VA/VE type of initiatives but we also used them in design to cost. So when we were trying to hit cost targets we wanted to know whether or not we are going to meet the cost target while we were in the design phase. A lot of times costs are very late stage surprises that throws the program very back, and then it can cause some delays in product launches. So we were successful in managing in that way.

LA: So you were really hitting it from two angles. You had both your VA/VE folks using aPriori but then when you get your design engineers using it, that’s when you can really see the benefits of getting costs out of the system before the product is shipped.

NG: Yes. And of course, the other thing is design for manufacturability (DFM). The DFM option is very useful for us because a lot of times design engineers don’t have the manufacturing background and aPriori actually allows them which process and which design to choose and why. Sometimes even trading tolerances in a design can be very valuable because engineers will design tolerances in a vacuum – and then they find out that it is very expensive and they don’t know why. If they knew which tolerance was driving costs up, then they could actually re-allocate their tolerances and do a better design to meet the cost objectives. So I plan to onboard new users from the design for manufacturability use case in aPriori shortly.

TTV Metrics and Basic Value Seen from aPriori

LA: Are you evaluating your payback period for aPriori? Do you have a sense?

NG: Yes, of course every CFO wants us to evaluate the payback period and especially the key metrics of SaaS products. Based on my past experience with aPriori, the payback period has always been less than six months. In 2023 we have very aggressive plans. Our customer expectations are higher than ever. We are counting on aPriori to help us to achieve a minimum of 2X savings on what we are going to invest, and that’s pretty much in line with the six-month payback period.

The opportunity for usability and user onboarding of aPriori at Dover is great. When you look at our designs, our industry has pretty much been prone to customization. There has been a lack of workflow standardization, so opportunities abound. It’s a matter of how we optimize our time. We are counting on aPriori to help us to automate processes.

With aPriori, I am confident we will see immediate time to value. Before, a lot of our process were manual and could take us up to five years to find all the cost reduction opportunities. Whereas all the five-year opportunities that we can find and work on, that would be a great thing for us. So that’s what we are looking for from aPriori in 2023.