aPriori today announced that a new version of the company’s flagship aPriori Professional software is generally available. This new version of the software is designated as aPriori Professional 2017 R1.
aPriori Professional 2017 R1 provides manufacturability and cost driver guidance for additional manufacturing processes and expands the guidance available for those processes already available. Extended manufacturability and cost driver guidance helps engineers during the design phase understand the manufacturing impact of tolerances, identify areas of the design that may present manufacturability issues and evaluate features that are expensive / time consuming to make. Listed below are some of the key Design to Cost (DTC) highlights featured in the new version of the software:
- DTC views are now available for Die Castings, Sand Castings, soft-tooled Sheet Metal components, and machined components analyzed in the 2-Model Machining process group.
- The DTC view for Plastic Injection Molded parts has been enhanced significantly to identify many additional manufacturability issues and cost drivers.
- The DTC view for Stock Machining also has been enhanced to provide additional guidance related to potential manufacturability issues that inflate product cost.
aPriori Professional 2017 R1 also includes support for new processes and routings commonly found in the aerospace and defense industry verticals. Cost models have been added to simulate 3-Roller-Bending and 4-Roller-Bending processes, and the selection of roller-bending machines available in Regional Data Libraries. This will help customers accommodate estimating the cost for very large rolled parts such as airplane wing and fuselage section skins. This new release also provides fully mechanistic process cost models for Anodizing Types I, IB, IC, II, IIB (“thin sulfuric” anodizing), and III (“hard coat” anodizing).
aPriori Professional 2017 R1 features new capabilities for improved user management that extends our integration with corporate information technology user management systems. The objective is to make the administration process of setting up and managing users easier and more automated. This update is based upon a growing trend by multinational customers to deploy product cost management strategies and systems for their facilities and programs located across the globe. And finally, the software now ships with out of the box user and usage tracking reports in Cost Insight Report to support deployment and usage monitoring.
“This latest release of aPriori represents a significant step forward in our efforts to provide cost and manufacturability guidance for product designers and engineers,” reported Julie Driscoll, Vice President of Strategic Marketing and Product Management. “We have discovered through numerous conversations with our customers that while generating a quick, detailed cost estimate is important, engineering teams also want a way to easily identify and eliminate the cost drivers that are increasing the cost of a product.
aPriori is designed to provide real-time cost information on parts and complete products. The software leverages CAD and intelligent cost models to quickly determine feasible manufacturing methods and product costs while generating detailed manufacturing analysis and cost estimates that quantify the impact of changes to product design, materials, manufacturing processes, volumes and location in real time. aPriori also enables manufacturers to leverage product cost data hosted in other enterprise applications to communicate product cost information between all functional organizations involved in product definition and delivery. This includes the import of complex engineering Bills of Materials (BOMs) from ERP, PLM and other enterprise applications. aPriori also incorporates enterprise quality business intelligence capabilities that provide intuitive, role-based insights for design, engineering, manufacturing, value-engineering and sourcing executives and managers.
