What are Kits?
NetSuite Kit/Package inventory items are an important part of the NetSuite ERP platform. They let items that are always sold together be grouped and priced accordingly so that sales reps don’t have to manage those details during order entry.
Why use Kits?
As an example, think of an office chair with a base, a seat, a back, 5 small casters, and 2 arms. An office furniture business might want to keep all this in their warehouse as separate items and ship them out as bulk parts to customers who order 50 chairs at a time, half with black cushions half with red, etc. Kits allow this to be priced and fulfilled systematically. If the business sold the chairs to be delivered completely built, they would not want to use Kits but instead use Assembly Items which allows for the work involved in taking the individual parts and building them into a different item.
When using NetSuite to sell kits, the default behavior is to show just the kit item itself on the sales order and item fulfillment. If this is the case, Pacejet will only see the kit item and not any of the components. When NetSuite is set up to track inventory in Bins or by Lot/Serial, the appearance of the item fulfillment changes, to include the kit items (parents) and the components (members). This is a very common configuration for Pacejet customers so most kit item fulfillments we see will include the parent and the members. See Figure 1 for an example.
Figure 1 – Kit Details on Item Fulfillment
Impact of NetSuite Kits on Pacejet
When the kit parent and the kit members are on the item fulfillment, unless something else is done during importing to Pacejet, this usually causes a conflict somewhere later in the process. We have a number of modification options, but it is important to look at the entire process when considering any single modification, since many parts of the Pacejet platform are interdependent.
Packing
When the order is packed, the kit and the components all appear as individual items, which can lead to confusion or roadblocks. For example, if Scan Pack is in use, they will need to scan the kit parent that doesn’t physically exist, so they will need to use a scan sheet or some other workaround just to complete packing. If they choose to hide the kit parents from Pacejet this problem goes away, but the parent carries some important information (such as sale price) so later features might not work as expected (such as international paperwork)
Paperwork
Paperwork will by default show both types of item, so if a customer placed an order for 10 chair kits made up of 10 components each, they will see a total qty of 110 items on the packing list when physically there are only 100 items being shipped. One option is to hide the component items and only show the Kit names (to reflect what the customer would have seen during purchasing) but this stops us from being able to do things like per-package paperwork later since we do not know if kits are split across boxes and how to reflect the quantity if they are.