The P. Camion's apparent distance of an abelian code is a generalization of the notion of the BCH bound of cyclic codes [3]. In this work, we present a method of computation of the apparent distance in multivariate abelian codes, based on manipulations of hypermatrices. Our algorithm needs fewer computations than any other, up to our knowledge; in fact, in the case of two dimensional abelian codes it has linear complexity. We give two applications. First, we construct abelian codes that multiply the dimension of a given cyclic code and equal its BCH bound. The second one is an approximation to a notion of BCH multivariate code.