Kitting with SAP – Simple or Complicated processes

 

In our manufacturing site, production/maintenance technicians use some pretty expensive tools for calibration and so on. The problem is that they kept loosing these tools and there was no real way track these tools or who used it last. They wanted us to provide a way to track & manage these expensive tools. We suggested kitting as a solution to their problem. All the tools and instruments that a technician need for a particular task was put in a tools box and handed out to the technician. This tools box will contain a bunch tools. We built these kits in SAP by assigning the kit a material number, a BOM containing the list of components that the kit will carry a task list on assembling these kits and a manual production order to build those kits. These kits were issued to either maintenance orders or process/production orders. We also built a custom user interface to track the kits based on their goods issues & receipts. A technician will check out the kit using a good issue to an order he/she is working on. Once the technician is done using the kit, he should return it to the warehouse through a goods receipt from the order. Hence we were able to track the kits.

There are many other ways to implement this functionality ranging from the very simple to the pretty complicated. In EWM, we can use a VAS to create kits. We can perform reverse kitting; we can have kits built by an external vendor or a sub-contractor. You have EWM create kits during picking process. If you are into complications, then is a process flow diagram which I picked from SAP site: