Become a Design Engineering Hero
Identify & Eliminate Cost Drivers in Real Time
In today’s ultra-competitive environment design engineers are under tremendous pressure to create quality products. With deadlines looming and time-consuming cost estimates to make, all of the back-and-forth can be frustrating. Luckily there is a software solution that works with your CAD system to give you real-time cost information.
Understand the impact of your design and trade-off decisions as you make them.
Do you face any of these profit-killing challenges?
What if you could:
- Highlight the most expensive manufacturing features on your CAD model and reevaluate the cost of tradeoff decisions by leveraging problem-solving Design to Cost software?
- Explore three to five times more cost savings through quick and easy automated costing of CAD models and design cost comparison views by quickly eliminating costly design variants in real time?
- Reduce late stage design churn by generating quick cost estimates and manufacturability analysis at the earliest design stages, so cost and manufacturability issues are identified and eliminated at the point of origin?
Take the Cost Savings Quiz
How Much Money Are You Leaving on the Table?
Key Attributes of a Modern Product Costing Solution
Product Cost Management software assesses the cost impact of engineering changes in real-time, helping you and your company avoid a number of profit-killing pitfalls.
With Product Cost Management, design engineers can better understand the price tag for changes as they are being considered so you can find the optimal balance between functionality, performance, quality, and cost that delivers the maximum value to the customer. You can explore more early design alternatives, routing out cost earlier and resulting in fewer changes later in development, when making changes gets incrementally more expensive.
Not surprisingly, the greater impact a change has on its cost, the more radical the change typically is in terms of design. But, these kinds of changes are only viable early in the product development cycle. By generating cost assessments early, companies can drive significant and measurable cost out of their products prior to production. This helps reduce the product costs, and ultimately COGS, which and improves the bottom line of the company.
Key Features To Look For In A Modern Product Costing Solution
Features:
System should provide automated cost estimate creation from a few basic inputs to simulate manufacturing operations and generate detailed manufacturing data and cost.
Benefits:
- Get products to market faster (don’t have to wait for quotes from purchasing or suppliers).
- Allows cost novices to quickly and easily produce cost estimates early in the design process.
- Eliminates costly mistakes that have to be fixed downstream by value engineering.
Features:
System should be able to take inputs in a variety of ways, including 3D CAD models, manual input, tables of data and batch analysis of large volumes of components.
Benefits:
- Eliminates the need for multiple specialized costing solutions.
- Accommodates collaboration with customers and supply chain partners that use different systems and costing approaches.
Features:
Software should have pre-built starter cost models representing a wide variety of manufacturing processes.
Benefits:
- Accelerates time to value.
- Helps end users understand cost drivers for a wide variety of manufacturing processes (sheetmetal stamping, injection molded plastics, casting, machining, forging, etc.).
Features:
Software should have cost data for a wide variety of machines as well as labor and overhead costs from countries across the globe.
Benefits:
- Quickly study tradeoff decisions for different supply chain/manufacturing scenarios for regions around the world.
Features:
Software should be able to easily import BOMs from an ERP or PLM solution and attach that BOM to geometric models of costed components.
Benefits:
- Quickly generate detailed cost for functional assembly groups made up of hundreds of parts.
- Understand if current status vs target cost for new product initiatives during the early stages of product development.
Features:
Create a single system of record that represents the current cost of parts, subassemblies and complete products.
Benefits:
- Creates consistency of costing practices across your globally distributed product development organization.
Features:
System should provide capabilities for both simple and complex changes to cost model logic and data.
Benefits:
- Accommodates the unique requirements of your specific business, no matter where you operate.
Modern Product Costing Technology
Unlock the potential for optimized design and cost by using information directly from your CAD system. The aPriori Product Cost Management platform understands the geometry of your design and the cost ramifications of the processes that would be required to manufacture it.
aPriori incorporates the cost of materials, labor, tooling and more to create a precise assessment of the cost to produce the part or product you are currently designing. More importantly, these precise cost estimates are delivered in real-time and automatically recalculated as you make modifications to your design.
Implementing an Effective Product Cost Management Program
The benefits of a systematic product cost management program are significant, yet many manufacturers struggle to implement these initiatives effectively. Immediate impact across your organization includes increasing profitability, accelerating time-to-market and growing revenues. Taking the right implementation approach is the key to effectively starting and building the foundation to expand your cost management initiative.
Download this eBook which discusses some of the obstacles involved and outlines key considerations and best practices for initiating an effective product cost management program. It also provides practical guidelines and examples of how to execute them for maximum impact.
eBook Download
Implementing an Effective Product Cost Management Program
“aPriori Expert Services has proven to provide quick, creative solutions allowing us to complete critical projects on time. Their flexibility to address complex technical and business considerations is valuable in maintaining a cost effective and efficient build out of our product costing solution.”
-John Allen
SCM Program Manager, Celestica
“aPriori will enable us to identify costs before they get built into parts and products, eliminating both unnecessary expense and cycle time. The increased visibility enables us to better meet our customers’ needs, especially in engineer to order, where understanding the cost impact of design decisions is so critical to both customer satisfaction and profitability.”
-Nick Williams
Vice President of Engineering, Circor
“aPriori’s solution gives us an important advantage over our competitors. By increasing our cost visibility, we are equipping more people in our organization to impact product cost before it gets designed and manufactured into our products. This is all part of building a stronger cost culture across our entire organization and continuing to strengthen our market leadership position.”
-Eric Côté
President and Chief Operating Officer, Soucy Holding, Inc.
“Our goal is to attain best costs first by ensuring quality in the initial process and eliminating quality problems at each subsequent process. Using aPriori, we will expand on this by identifying and eliminating unnecessary product costs in design – before they get built into the product. This benefits our customers in the automotive industry as well as their end-user customers.”
-Mike Pyle
Manager of Engineering, TG Missouri
“aPriori allows us, as a fast paced aerospace company, to quickly evaluate a plethora of cost beneficial design variations with a high level of confidence. In order to meet the ever increasing demands of design to cost it is imperative to reduce costs up front at the concept phases, and aPriori gives us that ability.”
-Stony Kujala
Manager Technical Product Design, Honeywell Aerospace
Additional Resources
How the Right Tools for DFM Help You Reduce Product Costs and Development Time
Discrete Manufacturer of Lift Trucks Drives Down Product Costs with aPriori
Spirit AeroSystems Deploys aPriori, Begins with Design to Cost
