Cost management platform expands enterprise capabilities

May 3, 2012

The latest release of aPriori's cost management platform is the 2012r1. The product offers new capabilities and enhancements that expand its cost optimization functionality with new baseline processes for manufacturers in automotive, consumer products, industrial equipment, and medical equipment.

The release also provides a common, consistent view of product costs across an organization and supports new international costing capabilities. As a result, discrete manufacturers are able to expand their product cost management efforts to new product lines and plants, improve decision-making in product design, and speed time to market for new products and parts, the company states.

The costing engine determines the cost of a part or product by pulling geometric and feature information automatically from a CAD model and leveraging its intelligent cost models to determine reasonable default inputs once the user has selected the manufacturing process, materials, and the factory or region where it will be produced. As a product evolves through the development life cycle, users can refine the cost by providing detailed inputs and overriding defaults to create a should-cost for negotiation or a manufacturing estimate.

As design changes are made or new product specs are introduced, the software automatically re-assesses and provides an updated product cost.