The BOM Loader imports a comma-separated values (CSV) file that defines components and attributes and maps its column headings to aPriori fields. CSV files are typically viewed and edited in Microsoft Excel.
See Formatting a BOM for more information.
This allows you to populate aPriori components and rollups with multiple types of cost data, including quoted costs, actual costs, user defined costs, and even estimated costs generated outside of aPriori, such as from a spreadsheet model. The flexibility to load in different scenarios allows you to easily create two variants of the same product in order to estimate the cost impact of different feature sets or manufacturing approaches.
You can structure the roll-up created by this BOM import with a functional group template (see the aP Pro User Guide for information about functional group templates.) In the CSV file, each line represents a component (that is, either a part or an assembly).
As aPriori reads the file line by line, it either creates new component scenarios or skips or updates existing component scenarios, based on the settings of the BOM Loader field labeled Processing Rule if Scenario Exists.
See Loading a BOM for more details.
Notes
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aPriori issues an error if all these conditions are true:
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Processing Rule if Scenario Exists is set to Create New Scenario
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The BOM Loader csv file references a pre-existing component that includes one or more UDA dependencies.
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The dependency conditions disagree.
To avoid generating an error when all the conditions are true, use one of these methods:
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Delete the UDA dependency.
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Explicitly define the UDA dependency in the Bom Loader csv file.
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When you load a BOM, aPriori does not do any summing of costs horizontally (that is, it will not recalculate a value in a row based on other values in that row at load time), but it will sum vertical costs (that is, a field at the assembly level will be summed from its sub-component values).