aPriori: Cost Assessment Software to Reduce Manufacturing Costs
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aPriori: Cost Assessment Software to Reduce Manufacturing Costs

Stephanie Feraday, President & CEO, aPrioriStephanie Feraday, President & CEO
Manufacturers from the emerging markets have begun to design and sell their products in the international market, skewing the competitive balance in the developed nations’ major consumer markets. To respond to these new challenges, established manufacturers need to change designs, and adopt new and innovative business models to counter the fierce competition from the emerging markets. “The need is to respond to the changes quickly and cost-effectively to achieve their margin goals,” adds Stephanie Feraday, President and CEO, aPriori. Gaining early visibility across the product lifecycle is the key to drive profitable outcomes and cut costs significantly. Based in Concord, MA, aPriori delivers technologically advanced and wide-ranging product cost management software and service solutions to transform the way organizations calculate and manage product costs.

From pre- to post production phase, the aPriori platform helps clients by providing informed design, manufacturing and sourcing decisions that reduce costs significantly. aPriori software includes sophisticated geometric feature recognition that extracts cost drivers from every individual part of the product and passes the information to a routing engine, helping customers to identify the different ways of manufacturing specific product features. “The intelligent routing engine inside our software combines Geometric Cost Drivers with some basic user inputs, and then runs hundreds of manufacturing process simulations to determine the most cost efficient approach to make that product,” explains Stephanie.

Most importantly, the aPriori platform allows customers to assess the costs involved in every stage of the manufacturing process within a few minutes. Customers can drive value in short term spend analytics, medium term value engineering opportunities, and long-term new product design initiatives, through aPriori’s products and solutions. In the first couple of months of leveraging the aPriori platform, clients can batch cost hundreds of parts, while identifying tremendous amount of opportunity for cost reduction.


The intelligent routing engine inside our software combines Geometric Cost Drivers with some basic user inputs, then runs hundreds of manufacturing process simulations to determine the most cost efficient approach to make that product


“In the medium term phase of six to twelve months, we help the value engineering teams by adding our technology to the brainstorming sessions to help them get quick feedback on the cost of design alternatives. It can be done on an ongoing basis to continually develop the pipeline of value engineering cost reduction opportunities,” says Stephanie. The customers can also leverage aPriori’s solutions through the course of a new product design initiative that drives the greatest cost savings through cost avoidance.

aPriori assisted a leading global train equipment manufacturer, Alstom Transportation, in costing the design of new coaches. By leveraging aPriori’s products on just one project, the customer was able to continuously look for ways to reduce the costs of the design and save the company 40 percent. The customer also used aPriori during the design process on another project, saving 50 percent on that program. “Overall, Alstom Transportation saved a significant amount of time and gained over $1.7 million savings,” says Stephanie.

The company’s Automated Product Costing platform provides collaboration capabilities to enable clients to work together across the product lifecycle and even collaborate with the suppliers outside the organization. aPriori also helps enterprises to create virtual production environments or digital factories, which give them the flexibility to conduct what-if analysis of different manufacturing processes and different supply chain scenarios.

In the coming days, aPriori plans to create the ‘aPriori Manufacturing Cloud’, assimilating, and compiling data associated with manufacturing costs and latest trends. “The cloud platform would provide tremendous strategic insight for our customers and the manufacturing ecosystem,” concludes Stephanie.