Make Direct Sales Kit

Hey I know that sales kits are by nature not able to be make direct. Let me explain…
We have some customers who prefer to buy a single line item. Historically, we’ll make a custom BOM just for this customer and put everything in it. No problem. But wait… in many cases, if we had written the order up with several lines, each line might go to a different product group… those product groups then point at different GL accounts. So we end up with the dollars going into the wrong buckets. This can affect commissions and skew the margin analysis, etc.

So we decided to try sales kits because we can sell 1 line and have it look like multiple lines on the back side. That works, but it only creates stock jobs and we are primarily an engineered to order shop. So it’s causing confusion now that our jobs are not linked to orders. I understand it, but I eat sleep and breathe Epicor all day every day. Any suggestions for a “make direct” line on a sales kit? Is there a different way to achieve our goal?

FYI - I did manage to trick Epicor into running with a Make Direct Sales Kit component… but as you’d expect you still have to receive it into stock in order to ship it. That’s OK, but I can’t seem to get a BPM to reliably set the Make Direct flag to true. It seems to error out or not set it at all. Any suggestions on the best way to do this?

Sales kits with make direct items are not supported by Epicor. There was a short period of time where “configured kits” COULD have make direct items in them, BUT this turned out to be a big and caused several huge financial problems when shipping products. If I remember correctly, the problems were related to job costs not correctly going to the shipment. The bug was remedied and sales kits (in all shapes) MUST be made up of all stock items.

I understand that it can’t ship “make direct”. But for visibility on our planning dashboards it would help us if we could mark certain lines make direct to drive the initial job creation and planning. But when the job would actually get released, we could change it to a make to stock job. Thoughts?