Bundles and kits

A kit is sold as one thing and made of several. That creates a question every time one is ordered: does the picker fetch a finished kit off the shelf, or fetch the parts?

When Assemblified is connected, Floormode knows what a kit is made of and can answer that question per order line — expanding the kit into its parts only when it needs to — rather than forcing you to choose one policy for ever.

Where the recipe comes from

The bill of materials — the recipe — lives in Assemblified. Floormode asks it what a given product is made of and remembers the answer, so allocating an order never waits on a round trip to another app.

If the recipe is not yet known, the order is not guessed at: Floormode requests it, allocates what it can from finished stock in the meantime, and expands properly once the answer arrives.

Stock first, then components

The rule is finished kits first, components for the remainder. It is worth spelling out because it is the behaviour merchants most often expect and most rarely get:

This matters because the alternative policies are both wrong some of the time. Always picking finished kits leaves orders short while the parts sit on a shelf. Always picking components breaks up finished goods you deliberately assembled ahead of demand. Doing stock first and expanding only the shortfall is the only version that never destroys work you have already done.

Two details follow from it:

A kit is only as buildable as its scarcest part. If the recipe needs three of a component and you have enough for two kits’ worth, two is what expands — the rest goes short.
Components are never stolen from a bundle’s own bin neighbours. Reserved units are tracked down to the bin and batch, so expanding one order’s kit cannot quietly consume stock another order already had claimed.

Kits that must never be broken up

Some products are only ever sold pre-assembled — a gift set that must arrive boxed, something that needs a qualified person to build it. Assemblified marks those, and Floormode honours it.

For those, the finished-stock pass still runs, but the shortfall does not expand. Whatever cannot be filled from finished kits goes to backorder with a “Waiting for production” hold instead, because the honest answer is “someone has to build one”, not “send the parts”.

How it reads on the order

Expansion is visible, not silent. On the order’s fulfilment view:

Component reservations appear indented under the line they came from, marked as a component of the ordered bundle — so the parts never look like things the customer ordered separately.
The line carries a summary badge counting what was assembled rather than picked whole — for the example above, “3 built from components”.
Parts of a recipe that are not stocked items — instructions, a licence, anything that exists on the recipe but never in a bin — are shown as not stocked and allocate nothing. They appear so the recipe reads completely, not because anyone must fetch them.

How it reads at the pack bench

The packer sees the parent — the thing the customer bought — with its components listed beneath and a per-bundle quantity, plus a note explaining why the parts are there:

This bundle was picked as its parts — there was no finished one on the shelf.

That sentence exists because without it the pack bench looks like a picking error. The packer needs to know the parts are the product, and how many of each go into one.

When components run short

If a component cannot be found in the quantity needed, the shortfall behaves like any other shortage: the units become a backorder and the order takes a “Waiting for production” hold. The picked components stay reserved — they are not released back to general stock, because they are already spoken for.

The order’s progress stepper shows the Waiting stage, which is the correct signal: the warehouse is not behind, the build is.