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Bulk costing Part Scenarios and assemblies

Introduction

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.

Note:

For more details on deep costing, see Deep Costing.

You can use the Bulk Costing & Analysis tool to generate multiple “what-if” scenarios for a component in 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 Cost an Assembly as a Bulk Cost Group

  1. Select Tools > Bulk Cost & Analysis and follow the same general procedures described in Supply Bulk Costing Data from a Spreadsheet 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.