Bulk costing part scenarios and assemblies

The Bulk Costing & Analysis utility can simultaneously cost multiple component scenarios, and it can also cost assemblies along with all their child components (“deep” costing). When you use this facility from the main UI, aPriori pre-populates fields with values from the component(s) you selected.

You can use the Bulk Costing & Analysis tool to generate multiple “what-if” scenarios for a component within a single batch run, making it much easier and faster to compare alternative manufacturing scenarios. For example, you could quickly generate cost estimates for manufacturing a part at two different volume levels, in each of three locations by specifying a distinct scenario name to store for each distinct set of Bulk Costing inputs and results.

  • To use the Bulk Costing & Analysis utility from the main aPriori UI, use the Cost menu. For more information, see Using the Cost menu.

  • You can also bulk cost scenarios and assemblies from the Bulk Loader available from the Tools > Bulk Costing & Analysis menu option, or from the command line. In these cases, rather than selecting components in the main aPriori UI, you populate the fields directly in the Bulk Costing & Analysis user interface, or through a User Inputs spreadsheet in either Excel or CSV format.

Regardless of how you use access the bulk costing functionality, scenario and assembly support is the same.

For costing different scenarios, see Scenario support fields.

Deep costing assemblies

“Deep costing” costs the assembly and all its child components. aPriori visits and costs every component of the assembly, including sub-assemblies. The total cost is calculated as the sum of the costs of all sub-components.

Note: If you specified an optional Rollup Name for output when defining the Bulk Cost Group, the roll-up will include components at the top level if they are sub-components of costed assemblies. They are already included or displayed as children of costed assemblies.

Deep cost an assembly from the main aPriori user interface

  1. Open the assembly and select Cost > Deep Cost Scenario or use the Alt+D shortcut.

  2. This brings up the Bulk Cost & Analysis user interface, pre-populated default values for the assembly.

  3. Edit the fields as necessary and click the Cost button.

Note: aPriori supports deep costing for SOLIDWORKS™ CAD models only if one of the following is true for each part to be costed:

  • Geometry does not need to be extracted or re-extracted.
  • Part's active configuration is named “Default”. (A part fails to cost if its active configuration is not named “Default”.)

Deep cost an assembly as a Bulk Cost group

  1. Tools > Bulk Cost & Analysis and follow the same general procedures described in User input files for other bulk costing operations.

  2. Ensure that the Deep Cost checkbox is checked.

 

You must ensure that the Bulk Loader is provided with either or both of the following:

  • A directory containing the top-level CAD assembly file to be costed, as well as the CAD files for the assembly’s sub-components. This is most likely when costing new assemblies that have not been costed before. If a User Inputs file is not provided, default values are used for costing.

  • User Inputs file in either Excel or CSV (comma-separated values) format, containing sub-components with user-defined values rather than default values for costing.

    • This is useful for re-costing assembly scenarios with different user options for comparison analysis.

    • You can create assembly scenarios using the Bulk Loader, but you cannot define the structure of the assembly.

    • You can only specify various user options for the assembly scenario.