Use Sales Kits to sell one line item that is actually made up of multiple items in your stock. You can only use sales kits for stock inventory (no buy to order, no make to order).
Sales Kit A consisting of parts B, C & D. When you add Kit A to the Order, Epicor automatically adds 3 more lines to the order for B, C & D. These are flagged as Kitted parts. They do not show up on the customer facing paperwork, and they’re hidden by default in Order Entry. They can be seen easily by checking the “show kitted parts” checkbox.
Pickers will see the components B, C & D.
You use Engineering Workbench to define the components. It’s the same as setting up a Bill of Material for manufactured goods, you list the components as material lines 10, 20, 30.
I would recommend playing around with them in a test environment. They’re pretty clean and straightforward. Aside from all kitted parts must be stock, I can’t think of any big gotchas. Would be happy to chat more if needed.
We use kits and @ken gave a good review so I’ll go with the 3rd & 4th questions. A gotcha we ran into is when someone changes a SO line from one part to a Kit part --the component lines (B, C & D in Ken’s example) won’t automatically added, this only triggers on a NEW SO Line. So we disabled changing Part# on SO Lines.
You can show components on SO & Pack Slip if you want it’s a configuration in Part master (Sites - Sales Kits).
We switched to Sale Kits about 18months ago and have had some major issues with Sales Kits and Demand Entry. Also, we recently picked up that if you re-open a Sales Order Kit Line it will re-open every closed release for the Component Lines (but not the Parent). This is an open ticket with Epicor at the moment though and no resolution as yet.
A concept people struggle with. RMAs. You cannot RMA the sales kit parent only the components. In earlier versions if a user attempted to RMA the sales kit parent it would throw an error. When adding RMA lines only the components can be rma’d and returned. When considering the fact that the parent sales kit part is not a real physical part, it makes sense…
Another point is performance. When using sales kits with a large number of lines don’t be surprised if users complain. Component lines get added to the sales order behind the scenes and as a result make it appear that addinga SK line is slower than a non SK part.
We use sales kits alot and like them. We do not allow component update on the order.. seems risky and we have must ship complete checked on them (part master) and print components.
One thing I would consider doing at initiation of use is to associate the kits with the parts they are sold to go with - complementary parts. Then sales personnel entering orders would know what goes with what and could upsell if desired. Tim S posted about the complementary parts here: Create multiple line items that are similar parts - #26 by timshuwy
Thanks for everyone’s time and sharing their experience, it sounds like there’s some opportunity with Sales Kits, especially for bundling stocked parts.
I’m glad I decided to reach out. Things like, components only getting added on new lines, RMAs needing to happen at the component level, and some of the performance/reopen quirks are exactly the kinds of gotchas we were hoping to uncover early.
The complementary parts idea is great also, hadn’t really thought about that angle but makes a lot of sense.
It sounds like being sure to have some guardrails in place (locking down edits, must-ship-complete, etc.) goes a long way in keeping things clean… this gives us a much better feel for what we’d be getting into, this is all very helpful information, thanks!
We originally looked at sales kits as a great time saver - not having to create jobs and report against them. Looking back, kanban receipts would probably have been a better fit.
A couple of other things we ran into (maybe fixed in more current versions of Kinetic?):
Multi-site, alternate methods needed to pull the components if order entry changes sites
No components loaded, order entry wasn’t hitting save on the last order line - must save the line to bring in the components
Confusion in matching up customer facing document “Lines” since each kit component is its own line. We ended up modifying all customer facing documents to use the DisplaySeq instead of Line. Although customer shipment entry uses native line so had to really train on packing slip versus “shipment order line”
Sales kits and credit card processing within earlier versions was buggy, especially if cancelling a shipment (might be fixed now)
Our work around for the kit being returned on an RMA was to not reference the original order in the RMA line, just added “-Kit” to the end of the part number and manually put in amounts, salesperson etc. We then had to disposition RMA to scrap using a “Kit Salvage” control and write on the components using the same “Kit Salvage” control to net out transactions
Forecasting kit components is buggy - there is an Epicor idea out there for improvements
Despite all of the above, I still work with many customers who are successfully using kits. Even ones that use component pricing and don’t have any issues with them.
Always recommend to test in a test environment and have your business use cases defined… Get accounting involved to validate the GL transactions too.
