Against a backdrop of constricted credit markets, in which manufacturers are pressed to find capital to fund supply purchases and maintain operations, aPriori today announced version 6 of its eponymous software package, which aims to help manufacturers cut product development costs.

aPriori’s software helps manufacturers address questions that involve, among other factors, costs related to the materials used to make a product, the labor involved, the suppliers available to source the components, which factory can best produce the product, and what effect design changes will have on the product cost.

First previewed last spring, aPriori version 6 features two major upgrades, one aimed at expanding the universe of companies that can use the product and the other geared toward increasing the aPriori user base within those organizations.

The manufacturing expansion comes in the form of coverage for Bar and Tube manufacturing processes. Previous versions of the product included functionality for die casting and sand casting as well as for sheet metal processes.

“With Bar and Tube, we basically are able to flesh out almost the entire chassis of a lot of products,” aPriori founder and Chief Product Officer Eric Hiller told Manufacturing Executive. The application covers solid bars in round, square, and rectangular cuts, angle iron, channels, and round, square, and rectangular hollow forms.

The extension of the product’s costing capabilities to these materials gives aPriori a much wider target market, Hiller said, as it covers many more companies in the manufacturing realm than the vendor had previously reached.

Similarly, with version 6, the company hopes to extend its reach within individual manufacturing organizations. The crux of that extension lies in the application’s CAD Universal Connection, which has always covered PTC’s ProEngineer CAD application but now covers Dassault’s Catia V5 and Siemens’ NX products. The Universal Connection allows individuals who do not use CAD applications to perform costing and sourcing due diligence outside of that environment.

Hiller said the functionality should attract product development managers and supply chain workers, such as procurement specialists or supply chain directors. In version 6, such users can point to a CAD file and bring that information into aPriori to explore the costs associated with it.

Points of entry into an organization vary, he said. It could be a vice president of engineering at some companies; at others, the director of supply planning, a chief purchasing official, or a plant manager. “There was no one door we were going to go in at the executive level.”

A basic implementation of aPriori, which includes 10 users, averages $200,000 for the first year. The company’s customer base is approximately 15, most of which have more than $250 million in annual revenue. While the costing issue runs through all organizations, for now, aPriori is focusing on the upper end of the market, a company spokesman said.