Chest, wardrobe, headboard: three products or one bedroom set?
Products sold as sets sit in stock as components but ship as a set. If that conversion is not recorded, your sellable stock looks different from what it actually is.
There is a familiar scene in companies that make or sell furniture. In the warehouse, the chest, the wardrobe, the nightstand, and the headboard all sit separately. The customer does not buy them one by one; they buy a “bedroom set”. Sales sells one product, the warehouse ships four components.
The problem is that these two views never meet on the stock side. If the system sees components, it cannot tell how many sets are sellable; if it sees the set, it misses that the components also sell on their own. In most companies this arithmetic lives in a spreadsheet or in the warehouse manager's head.
What that gap costs
- The sellable set count is unknown: three of four components are plentiful, one is out, and the system still says “set available”.
- The same component is promised twice: sold individually and also reserved for a set.
- A campaign price is quoted for the set, but how many sets can actually go out is only settled by counting on the shelf.
- When a set is broken up and components return to individual sale, that reversal is recorded nowhere.
- At count time the component quantities add up but the set quantities do not, and the variance cannot be explained.
Here too the quantities are not wrong. What is wrong is which identity those quantities carry — exactly as with lot tracking and nationalisation.
Kitting has to be a transaction
The right shape is not to open a separate product card for the set and track it by hand. Kitting should be a warehouse transaction: components come out of stock, the set goes into stock, and the conversion stays on record. The reverse has to work the same way — when a set is broken up, the components return to stock.
Once it is a transaction, two questions answer themselves: how many sets can I ship today, and which component is missing to build one more. These are the questions sales asks most often and the warehouse answers with most difficulty.
Not only furniture
Kitting is most visible in furniture, but it is not the only case. Promotional bundles, gift sets, spare-part kits, assembly sets — all carry the same structure: components that can also be sold independently combining into a new sellable identity.
In iyibir WMS, kitting runs as a warehouse transaction and stays in sync with Logo ERP. We can set up your own set structure in a demo and look at how the sellable count is derived.