aPriori Continues to Accelerate the Pace of Innovation with aPriori 2016 R1

aPriori, a leading provider of product cost management (PCM) software solutions for the enterprise today announced an important update to the company’s flagship product - called aPriori 2016 R1. aPriori continues to push the boundaries for “democratization of cost” by implementing solutions that have appeal across all product design and build teams. aPriori PCM Solutions address Design Cost Analysis, Should Cost Negotiation and New Business Development challenges and help customers improve product profitability, accelerate time to market and win new business.

Register for the “What’s New in aPriori 2016 R1?” webinar.

Highlights of the aPriori 2016 R1 product release include:

User Experience Upgrades for Design Engineers:

• A new Part Summary view to quickly understand a high-level cost breakdown and manufacturing processing steps that are contributing to a component cost. At a glance, design engineers can know whether labor, material, or tooling are predominant cost drivers; and if the part is meeting cost and mass targets.
• A simplified, side-by-side Comparison capability to analyze cost and manufacturing differences between alternative designs or manufacturing scenarios, enabling engineers to more easily consider cost/value tradeoffs.
• Design to Cost guidance to help identify areas of a part that are expensive or difficult to manufacture. The first release of this capability is a beta version that supports milled parts.

User Experience Upgrades for Cost Engineers:

• Formula Dependencies that enable an expert user to drill into the detailed assumptions of a cost scenario for review and refinement. A cost engineer can quickly access the detailed inputs for a cost scenario, modify inputs and see resulting cost, supporting productive supplier collaboration and negotiation.
• Significantly improved system performance working with large assemblies that contain hundreds to thousands of parts.

Cost Model Enhancements:

• Improved cost estimates for parts machined on 4-axis Milling machines, including improved determination of setups/part re-orientations, finish-machining operation assignment, and automatic-evaluation of 4-axis Mill routings.
• Flexible controls for a cost or manufacturing expert to refine part setup and operation sequencing assumptions and estimate assembly-level milling operations on a component.
• Numerous refinements to casting process models which improve the completeness and precision of the cost estimates.

“Our product development team worked extremely hard on this release,” said Julie Driscoll, vice president of strategic marketing and product management. “We spend a lot of time working side-by-side with our customers, understanding how they interact with the system, learning the types of information that are most valuable to them, and observing how they leverage that information in their interactions with other members of their product team, suppliers and even their own customers. The aPriori User Council has also been enormously valuable in helping us define and prioritize new product enhancements. When you are working with some of the smartest design and cost engineers from companies like Whirlpool, Boeing, Honeywell and American Axle & Manufacturing, it really helps streamline and accelerate our pace of product development.”

About aPriori

aPriori software and services generate hard-dollar product cost savings for discrete manufacturing and product innovation companies. Using aPriori’s real-time product cost assessments, employees in engineering, sourcing and manufacturing make more-informed decisions that drive costs out of products pre- and post-production. With aPriori, manufacturers launch products at cost targets, maximize savings in re-work projects and avoid overpaying for sourced parts. To learn more about aPriori and its product cost management solutions and services, visit www.apriori.com or call 1.978.371.2006. To see an overview demonstration of aPriori, click here.

aPriori on Twitter @aPriori_Inc.
aPriori on XING https://www.xing.com
Enterprise Product Costing Blog

aPriori and aPriori Technologies are registered trademarks of aPriori Technologies Inc. All other trademarks, registered trademarks or service marks belong to their respective holders.

View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160405005140/en/