aPriori Expands Into Costing of Electronic Products

CONCORD, Mass., Jan. 11, 2017 --  aPriori, the leading provider of automated product cost management (PCM) software solutions for global manufacturers, today announced an important addition to the company’s product portfolio – a new software module that automates the cost calculation of Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA).

With automated PCBA costing software, users will be able to quickly generate a detailed cost estimate by importing a Bill of Materials with basic attribute information about the components.  The PCBA costing module will assign a cost to the board components using a library of component costs and estimate the assembly costs of attaching the components to the board.  Users can also specify test and verification processes required whereby the system will automatically assess the cost of each process and roll it into the overall PCBA cost.  The aPriori PCBA costing module comes with more than forty-five out-of-the-box assembly and test manufacturing cost models and is built on aPriori’s extensible platform, supporting the addition of more processes.

Key benefits that customers will realize with aPriori’s new PCBA cost module include:

• Providing engineers with early visibility into the cost impact of design decisions and supporting exploration of options like single vs. double sided or the assembly cost impact of using different size boards.
• Enable Sourcing to negotiate more effectively with suppliers by providing detail on component costs, manufacturing costs & commercial costs
• Quantify cost impact of VAVE explorations
• Ability to aggregate and analyze data across product lines and business units
• Centrally located cost models will drive consistency of costing across a team

Watch an Overview of Our New PCBA Solution

Printed Circuit Boards (PCB) are used in all but the simplest electronic devices and are used to route signals and power through electronic devices.  They appear in almost all discrete manufactured products to some degree.  They can also represent a significant portion the cost for a product, especially in industry verticals such as aerospace & defense, high tech electronics (computer and communications equipment and other consumer electronic products), healthcare, oil & gas and increasingly in automotive and transportation products.  While it is a significant portion of a company’s spend, the divisions responsible for PCB design are typically smaller than those responsible for mechanical designs.  This has the potential to create a time-to-market bottleneck that can be easily overcome by automating the product costing process.

Julie Driscoll, aPriori’s Vice President of Strategic Marketing & Product Management, offers the following insight on the importance of this new product offering, “Since the company’s inception, aPriori has delivered more than 200 cost models to market that have helped customers determine the cost of mechanical products, manufactured using processes such as metal forming, plastic injection molding, casting, forging, machining, etc.  In the spring of 2015, aPriori released its first electrical costing module – Wire Harness Assembly Costing.  This new product that enables engineers and sourcing managers to quickly calculate the cost of PCBAs takes us a giant step closer towards our vision of automated costing for highly complex mechatronic systems."

Key capabilities of the new PCBA costing module will include:

• Component Costing:
  - Automatically calculated for an entire BOM based on part lookup in centralized Component Library
  - Cost information will be stored within component library:
    * Volume Discounting
    * Company Negotiated Costs 

• Assembly & Testing Costs for Rigid Boards:
  - 50+ assembly and testing processes
  - Single & double sided boards
  - Automated inclusion when possible from BOM information
  - Manual inclusion when necessary based on user input
  - Outputs generated:
    * Manufacturing time per process
    * Manufacturing cost per process
    * Aggregated costs for the PCBA

About aPriori
aPriori software and services generate hard-dollar product cost savings for discrete manufacturing and product innovation companies. Using aPriori’s real-time product cost assessments, employees in engineering, sourcing and manufacturing make more-informed decisions that drive costs out of products pre- and post-production. With aPriori, manufacturers launch products at cost targets, maximize savings in re-work projects and avoid overpaying for sourced parts.  To learn more about aPriori and its product cost management solutions and services, visit www.apriori.com or call 1.978.371.2006. To see an overview demonstration of aPriori, click here.

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CONTACT:
Rick Burke
Vice President, Marketing
[email protected]
978.451.7675