Deep Costing

“Deep costing” analyzes the current scenario for an assembly and all its sub-components, including sub-assemblies.This gives you a quick and easy way to analyze the whole of an assembly, without needing to analyze each part in an assembly individually.

Use the Cost > Deep Cost Scenario menu option to perform deep costing. See Deep Costing Assemblies.

Deep costing uses the Bulk Costing & Analysis engine to perform calculations. Bulk costing itself is a separate process - see Bulk Costing and Analysis.

Process Overview

When deep costing assemblies:

• If a sub-component (scenario) with unsaved changes is open in the main UI, aPriori copies the sub-component scenario to the Bulk Cost Group. If a sub-component is not open in the main UI, the component state is read from the database.

• If a sub-component does not exist in the database (and so cannot be opened), a new component scenario is created with default values. However, the component must be associated with a CAD file (unless the component is being costed in the User Guided process group). If an assembly has been initialized, the immediate sub-components are automatically associated with CAD files even if they have not been initialized. For deeper level children, aPriori assumes that those sub-component CAD files are in the same directory as the root assembly. If that is not the case, you must ensure they are CAD-file associated prior to clicking on Deep Cost menu.

When you deep cost an assembly and view the Bulk Costing & Analysis UI, the scenario of the top-level assembly is the one you selected in the main aPriori UI. The sub-components are set to whatever scenarios are associated with this assembly; this may have been switched by the user in the UI or may have been specified during BOM loading. If nothing else has been specified, the Official scenario is the default.

Deep Costing Roll-ups and Comparisons

You can deep cost a roll-up or a cost comparison, but only their sub-components appear in the Bulk Cost Group. The roll-up or cost comparison themselves do not associate with any cost and therefore, are not costed. However, if a roll-up contains a sub-roll-up, then the components from that sub-roll-up are also included in the costing. See Roll-ups.

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.