Kitting Capability Added to ProSKU WMS

E-commerce businesses who regularly need to pick a predefined group of items from their warehouse to fulfil a customer order or serve an assembly operation can now simplify the process using a new kitting module for the ProSKU cloud-based warehouse management system (WMS). The new module is an optional add-on that augments the already rounded functionality available in ProSKU.

Kitting is known by various terms including bill of materials, product assembly or parts explosion and refers to a physical process used in many goods handling environments. Common in manufacturing, engineering and automotive sectors, it is also used widely within the bathroom and furniture trades, and by a large number of consumer goods vendors.

A kit is basically several product items which together make up a larger or main product (sometimes called the ‘master product’). This product might be an entire unit, for example an engineering assembly, a suite or collection of items sold together (such as bathroom or home furniture) or something typically ordered as a single item, such as a table lamp, which might be stored in discrete parts in different parts of the warehouse.

The physical order picking process involves grouping the sub-products for either assembly or despatch as part of a works or sales order. Assembled kits may often be re-stored pending a sales order for the completed item, but individual parts may also be assembled into sales units as part of a despatch operation. In a reverse of the process, a complete assembled kit could also be ‘de-kitted’ if its component parts are needed, for example if they can also form part of different kits.

In most situations kit ‘parts’ are taken from storage for either pick or assembly in a process that is ideally automated by a computer system. This is sometimes done by a manufacturing system but also increasingly, on the wholesale or retail side, by a WMS. Recognising that the process is used by both large and smaller companies, including growing numbers of e-commerce vendors, ProSKU has introduced this as an optional system module.

The ProSKU functionality allows a kitted ‘master product’ to be created on the system along with its component sub-products and, where applicable, sub-sub products. The system allows either works or sales orders to be processed with pick or assembly instructions generated as required. For picking operations carried out using the ProSKU Android App, a number of special functions are provided to facilitate collation of kits where multiple common kit parts are involved.

Delivery documentation can also be formatted according to buyer needs – to identify the delivered parts as a single item (as for the table lamp example above) or alternatively where a detailed breakdown of the kit parts included is required (for example in the case of a bathroom suite).

A cloud hosted solution with a simple monthly pricing model, ProSKU supports all essential warehouse stock management functions including receipt and putaway, picking and despatch, stock management, and reporting. It integrates quickly and easily with all popular e-commerce platforms including eBay, Amazon, Woo Commerce, Magento and Shopify, as well as traditional CRM solutions such as Sage.

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