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Before adding kits or bill of materials please read item setup and bill of materials design considerations.
Kits are used to sell a group of items together. A kit is different than an assembly in that the Kit itself is not an item whereas the assembly is an item. In other words, when you ship a kit, you are actually shipping the individual items within the kit where as when you ship an assembly, you DO NOT ship the individual components but rather the assembly. An assembly (or job) can be configured which has some similar characteristics of a Kit as we discuss later.
The purpose of creating a kit is to offer the customer choices of what is included in the kit at order time. To create a kit, you first select a group of type kit and give the item a name as you would for any item. You should also complete the Sales description as this will be used on quotes and sales orders.
Kits are comprised of components and component selections. You first name the component, select its type and then enter the item selections in the kit selection area. To start, click the Kit/Config tab and click in the first line within Kits components' grid under the column 'Short Name' and enter a brief description or the component. Under type you have three choices:
Fixed: The component listed will also be on the kit. Only one item will be shown in the kit selection area.
Variable: The customer will have a choice between several items. The selection marketed as 'Default' is the standard choice. At one item must be selected. You may list an unlimited number of items in the kit selection area as long as no item is duplicated.
Yes/No: Optional items to be included in the kit, if you uncheck the 'Default' column, the price of the optional item will not be included in the kit. You may list an unlimited number of items in the kit selection area as long as no item is duplicated.
You can change the qty listed in the kit selection. The price of the kit is the sum of price the items that make up the kit. You can change the kit price by changing the price of the items that make up the kit OR at order time for the kit as a whole. To change the price of an individual kit selection, you must first UNCHECK 'Kit selection prices must be the same as its item price' in Inventory Preferences.
In the kit components grid you can mark if the component is active, add comments for your users to view at order time and make the component printable on the Sales Order - Kit printout.
On the kit selections you will notice a check box called 'One time'. Generally when used on a sales order the quantity of the kit selections is multiplied by the quantity ordered for the entire kit. You may want however to include an item that does not vary with the kit quantity, to accomplish this check the 'One Time' and the selection quantity will NOT vary in proportion with kit quantity but rather stay fixed.
The following image shows a kit I create called BTS - Back to school kit.
Component Details for variable component - Erasers
Component Details for optional component - Optional items
You are now ready to use the kit on a quote or sales order.
As mentioned a kit is different than an assembly in that the Kit itself is not an item whereas the assembly is an item. But what if you want to allow the components of the bill of materials to change at order time? For example a make-to-order computer manufacturer may want to give a customer a choice of hard drives. This is where the configurable bill of materials is used. Setting up a configurable has tow steps:
Establishing choices and options (i.e. the Configuration)
Linking the Configuration to the bill of materials.
The process of creating the Configuration is exactly the same you would do with kits with the following exceptions:
You can not add a fixed component.
There is no 'On Time' check box as this is handled in the bill of materials.
To link the item, you need to add the exact same item to the bill of materials that was added to the Configuration.
If the kit is type variable you should only add the default selection to the bill of material.
If the kit type is yes/no then ALL of the selections must be added to the bill of materials.
Then use the ‘Configure BOM’ button to link the items.
Simply drag the boxes from the Kit Items to the corresponding item of the BOM Items. All Orders will do link the items automatically by using the 'Link' button. To delete the link, just select its name, right-click, and then choose Delete. You can also click the Delete icon to remove that component.
Note, kit items are not linked to the bill of materials, the kit items will be treated as an additional items at order time.
At order time you may want to restrict options depending on what was selected on a previous options. For example a custom computer manufacturer that has options for processor and operating system and that certain operating systems will only work with certain processors. You want only the operating system that works with the selected processor to be listed as operating system options. You can accomplish this using kit rules. To use kit rules CHECK 'Enable kit rules' in Inventory Preferences.
When working with kits rules the following logic applies:
Kit rules can only be applied to items that have been saved so you need to save and reload the item before working on kit rules.
Kit rules can only be applied on a preceding component, therefore a kit cannot apply to the first component listed.
Kit rules cannot be applied to fixed components.
The rules that apply to a certain component can only be based on a preceding variable type component.
While in an item, click the Kit / Config tab and you will see 2 new columns on the kit components grid. Click the icon in the 'Rules' column for the component that you want to apply the rule to. The following dialog will be shown.
Using the drop down called Preceding Components, I select the component name that I want to base my rule on which will load its selection in the box 'Selection for First Choices..' and the current components selections are lists in the box 'Selection for Third Choices...'. I want to restrict my Third Choice component to 6545.B.M when 32423/R/M is selected in first choice. To this, I highlight both selections then click the add button. This will add 6545.B.M to the last box. Repeat until you have applied your rules then press Save & Close to return back to the item and press Save again commit the rules to the database.
You can delete a rule by clicking the 'Delete' button on the toolbar.
You will notice on the kit components that there is an additional column called 'Print'. If this button is unchecked and you are using a configuration, then you can opt not to print the item on the 'sales order config bom' form.