aPriori Technologies

Score8.7 out of 10

16 Reviews and Ratings

What is aPriori Technologies?

aPriori provides design and sourcing Insights to unlock and identify new opportunities for reducing product cost and carbon footprint, optimizing manufacturing and supply chain risk, and improving design engineering and sourcing teams’ productivity. Their automated Insights Platform is used to reduce time to market, meet sustainability targets, and accelerate revenue growth.

What are Manufacturing Insights?

aPriori’s Manufacturing Insights Platform simulates each step of the product manufacturing process, including both primary and secondary operations. The data generated by a manufacturing simulation helps product teams to identify and eliminate any potential design or sourcing related issues that would either slow down or stop the production process and cause delays to a product launch or inflation of manufacturing costs.

Identification & Elimination of Manufacturing Obstacles Before They Slow Down Production

Digital Factories provide manufacturability analysis and directional costing that give design teams and engineers an incentive to design for manufacturing (DFM), reduce engineering change orders (ECOs), and launch products on schedule. Digital factories also provide sourcing teams with the capability to compare production environments across an extensive range of manufacturing criteria to evaluate fully burdened manufacturing costs and inform site selection. For a given product design, digital factories can be used to identify and select less expensive raw materials, cheaper manufacturing processes offering faster cycle times, and alternative finishing options.

What is Digital Factory Software?

An aPriori digital factory is a combination of two key elements: aPriori Regional Data Libraries and aPriori Manufacturing Process Models. Out-of-the-box digital factories are a baseline configuration for a production deployment. They provide benchmark estimates and manufacturing guidance. The analyses produced are based on general and reasonable manufacturing practices and average rates not specific to an individual industry. aPriori Digital Factories can be configured to represent specific manufacturing practices and cost structures of internal facilities or those of a trusted supplier.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

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Abhijeet Singh View profile

Post Graduate Engineering Trainee at INGERSOLL - RAND TECHNOLOGIES AND SERVICES PRIVATE LIMITED (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

aPriori is used to serve the following purpose: 1. To select strategic suppliers to procure parts 2. For make vs buy decision 3. Design engineers use to identify the cost of design 4. Selection of the right manufacturing process to manufacture a part 5. To validate the right suppliers, right manufacturing process, and the right location to procure. The end objective is to procure parts at optimal cost.

Pros

Design for manufacturing
Bulk cost
Vpe development
Defining the new Vpe or process
User defined costing

Cons

User defined process can be better
N/A

Most Important Features

Vpe
Cmwb
Bulk cost

Return on Investment

Negotiation with supplier with fact and figures
Help supplier and organization to select right process
Target cost

Alternatives Considered

Boothroyd Dewhurst DFMA Software

Other Software Used

Microsoft Excel, Boothroyd Dewhurst DFMA Software, Microsoft Power BI

Verified User

Employee in Research & Development (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I found aPriori is a great tool that supports all stakeholders of any product lifecycle in the Design Development of Product Maintenance. Also found it as an excellent tool in the hands of a Designer to understand the impact of design on cost and identify design cost Issues and design rule violations early into the design phase. aPriori is also helping to understand the effect of alternate designs and processes.

Pros

Easy to understand algorithm.
In large databases, join and prune steps are easy to implement.
The resulting rules are intuitive and easy to communicate to an end user.

Cons

Dynamic itemset counting technique can add new candidate itemsets at any marked start point of the database during the scanning of the database.
The transaction reduction method reduces the number of transactions scanned in interactions. The transactions which do not contain frequent items are marked removed.
The sampling method picks a random sample from the database for frequent itemset. It may be possible to lose a global frequent itemset.

Most Important Features

aPriori is software for frequent itemset mining and association rule learning over a relational database.
This software uses two steps “join” and “prune” to reduce the search space.
aPriori proceeds by identifying the frequent individual items in the database and extending them to larger item sets as long as those item sets appear sufficiently often in the database.

Return on Investment

It improved our business model and strategies.
Provided get analytics for future view.
The main negative impact is that it is costly, a waste of time to hold a vast number of candidate sets with many frequent itemsets, low minimum support, or large itemsets.

Alternatives Considered

MATLAB

Other Software Used

MATLAB, Autodesk Fusion 360, Siemens Solid Edge

Pankaj Singh Routela View profile

PGET- Cost Research, Cost Analysis & VA/VE center, DBS-(Product Cost Management) in Product Management at Danfoss (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Excellent cost model maturity level
Reliable data library for different regions
Precise should-cost have well-defined cost drivers
Spreadsheet report flexibility with cost insights

Cons

Cutting parameters and logic for milling process need to be reviewed and refined
Super-finishing processes need to be added

Return on Investment

Increased efficiency in delivering our projects.
Leverage to look into product cost at design level.
More saving realizations we can see and use for negotiation.

Alternatives Considered

GeneralCOST Estimator for Excel

Narendran Dhanasekaran View profile

Cost Engineer in Product Management at Danfoss (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Sheet Metal-Process Group, Transfer Die is at the Best, which gives detailed operation setup for the Parts as well as shows the number of parts in the Sheet i.e nested Loop thereby reducing the Scrap as well (Scrap Management)
Forging-Steel: Very good for for medium and complex medium Hot Forging type parts. Machine overhead data is very detailed where facts are used for the negotiation i.e Electricity Rate, Power, Labour Rate, Maintenance rate, etc.
Surface Treatment / Other Secondary Process such as powder coating, wet coat, electro plating: These all work well. We can also use masking options the treatment, In the event of of any leak tests or X-Ray inspections, we can add the process which will then account the pre/post operation time for the treatments
2-Model Machining: Machines and routing combinations are huge and can be used to determine the most economic way to produce these parts. We can also override to find the supplier methodology and cost. It gives very detailed information on the feed rate, speed rate, and power capacity.
Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerating (GD&T) can be added on the GCD's which will help detect the super finishing process, which is another advantage. In the current 2016 R2 SP, aPriori can detect it from the CAD Models
Design to Cost feature, provides the design engineers as well as cost engineers to understand the which feature take most cycle time and whether changing that feature reduces the complexity in machining thereby cycle time can be reduced

Cons

Investment Casting Model: We have a basic model where we have captured all the processes involved, but when logic is being missed in the same in process, we have to fine-tune it to make it as effective as other process groups.
Powder Metal technology: Similarly, we need more process setup options in order to provide more logic for manufacturing. It does have the basic manufacturing setup
Mass Volume Machining: Transfer machines, swiss lathes need to be incorporated for Mass and high-speed machining
Forging: Hollow Forging as well as forging of Non-Ferrous metal need to addressed as the Forging cost is too high

Return on Investment

No Negative Impacts
At our Organization, ROI is calculated in terms of time, speed, and value
Time: We can reduce the project implementation by a few days
Speed: Delivering the cost in a few hours compared to weeks in the past
Capacity: Tool helps to make things run parallel i.e bulk costing increases capacity
Value: Negotiations have resulted in savings with respect to list price

Other Software Used

aPriori Product Cost Management

Usability

Andrew Arul Rose A View profile

Cost Engineer at Danfoss (10,001+ employees employees)

Pros

Speed and capacity
Bulk costing
Detailed cost analysis involving complex geometries of parts
Cost insight design
Product Cost management support

Cons

Customization of the cost logic is tricky.
Full products costing & process involved in the proprietary parts are less or not available for costing
Sheet metal logics for costing may be improved.
Focus on Electronics Cost models
Electronics - Component Costings

Return on Investment

We are able to set value based negotiations with the suppliers based on the facts or analysis generated by aPriori
We get good savings based on the facts provided.
We are good & consistent on the savings.

Other Software Used

AutoCAD

Teamcenter

SOLIDWORKS

Boothroyd Dewhurst DFMA Software

FACTON ECP Suite

Costimator

HCL DFMPro

aPriori Technologies