Costing using CAD properties

Your aPriori system administrator might have configured your system to automatically extract properties or parameters from the CAD file and map those values to aPriori production inputs or User Defined Attributes (UDAs). If your CAD parts contain all the information that aPriori needs to successfully do a costing (Process Group, Digital Factory, Material, and Annual Volume), it is possible to cost a part when you open it, without the need for manually entering such information in aPriori. For a role such as Design Engineer, this enables you to concentrate on part design and to cost parts without worrying about production details that might be outside of your area of expertise.

Note: Review any inputs to ensure that they seem reasonable for the part you are costing.

This section describes the production inputs that can be automatically mapped from CAD properties. Additional details and capabilities such as mapping to UDAs are discussed in the aPriori Professional System Administration Guide. The discussions in this section concentrate on the aPriori Professional user interface, but also apply to Bulk Costing (see Bulk Costing and Analysis).

If this feature is implemented for your installation, note the following changes from an installation where automatic CAD property extraction is not implemented:

  • Fields in the Cost Guide may be automatically set and updated without the need for you to manually enter values.

  • Properties that change in the CAD file may cause a Reconcile Inputs window to appear to enable you to accept the new values or continue to use previously-entered aPriori values. For more information, see Reconcile Inputs.

When the values for aPriori fields are provided initially from CAD properties, you can override those values in aPriori to explore the cost impact of different manufacturing scenarios. When you override a production input that is mapped to a CAD property, your override value continues to be used for subsequent costings unless it is cleared. There are two ways to clear the override: