aPriori Helps HARBEC Accelerate Quoting for Precision Manufacturing Products

HARBEC is a precision manufacturing company that provides a wide range of manufacturing services, including injection molding, mold building, CNC machining, and additive manufacturing/3D printing. They serve multiple industries and offer specialized, high-performance materials, including over 300 resins for molding and more than 100 different metals for CNC machining. HARBEC is known for its ability to manufacture products to tight tolerance specifications and offers a variety of specialty processes under each manufacturing category. As a true contract manufacturer, HARBEC often quotes assemblies that include several of these processes within the same product design. The company has a sophisticated quoting team that historically relied on manual quoting methods, such as spreadsheets and experience-based estimates, to generate accurate quotes for customers. However, the complexity of their diverse manufacturing processes created operational challenges and bottlenecks, necessitating the need for an automated quoting solution.

HARBEC’s business requires quoting of precision-manufactured products across multiple industries. Their quoting group navigates the challenge of developing accurate cost models across unusually diverse manufacturing processes. They generate quotes for injection molding, mold building, CNC machining, additive manufacturing/3D printing, and more, with multiple specialty processes available under each of these categories. Along with manufacturing to tight tolerance specifications, HARBEC offers a variety of specialized, high-performance materials (including over 300 resins used for molding and more than 100 different metals for CNC machining). This diverse set of manufacturing variables creates a serious business challenge for churning out timely and accurate quotes. Each of these processes comes with different overhead, burden rates, machining costs, and even more—a variety of complex cost drivers. As a true contract manufacturer, HARBEC often quotes assemblies that include several of these processes within the same product design. HARBEC historically relied on manual quoting using tools like spreadsheets, generic setup times, and experience-based estimates of cycle times. While their sophisticated quoting team successfully created accurate quotes for customers, the complexity introduced a variety of operational burdens. HARBEC needed to train quoting specialists across a multitude of concentrated manufacturing processes. The HARBEC quoting team emphasized cross-training, but the immense diversity of required quotes inevitably pushed specific team members and working groups to build upon their specialist knowledge for different manufacturing categories. Concurrently, the time demands of complex quoting workflows risked creating chronic bottlenecks.

HARBEC’s senior management team identified an automated quoting process as a valuable operational goal. They needed a tool that could speed up quoting to enable superior response times while ensuring consistent and accurate cost models. The right solution would need to allow all quoting team members to effectively generate quotes, limiting reliance on specialized individual knowledge of various manufacturing processes. HARBEC identified aPriori as the cost modeling software that could finally address all of these business-critical requirements, while offering potential for further use cases, like Design for Manufacturability. Unlike cost estimation tools considered by HARBEC in the past, aPriori could analyze the actual geometry of a component directly using 3D models. And it could be applied across all requisite manufacturing processes. In a matter of months, HARBEC implemented customized quoting capabilities for their critical manufacturing processes in aPriori. They now benefit from fully automated quoting across injection molding, mold building, CNC machining, and additive manufacturing. New products leaving HARBEC’s facility are quoted using aPriori. HARBEC’s aPriori implementation incorporates proprietary formulas, allowing them to capture their preferred quoting approach within the software. aPriori can then utilize digital manufacturing simulation to generate cost models in a fraction of the time required by manual, spreadsheet-driven quote estimation (in many cases generating a same-day quote).

• HARBEC’s new automated approach is resulting in highly accurate cost models for virtually every quote.
• In addition to dramatically accelerating the quoting process, aPriori has also helped reduce the gap between quoted and actual costs.
• aPriori is also integrated with HARBEC’s ERP system, importing and exporting product data directly to/from the ERP system to streamline the quoting processes as much as possible.
• HARBEC plans to implement a more comprehensive system for reporting manufacturability analyses based on aPriori’s digital manufacturing simulations, including full budgetary pricing that allows customers to see precisely how their design choices are driving the quoted price.
• HARBEC is also planning to roll out aPriori’s capabilities to other teams outside of quoting, including training engineers to work with aPriori directly.

• aPriori can generate cost models in a fraction of the time required by manual, spreadsheet-driven quote estimation, in many cases generating a same-day quote.