Benefits of Assembly Products
Offer a wider variety of products
Assembled products can be used to sell products that you have made, assembled, or bundled together into a secondary product. The components of assembled products may or may not be sold separately.
Accurate inventory counts, trackable results
Assembled products are built of different items, or inventory components. Because Erply tracks each of these components separately, each item’s stock is automatically depleted when the main assembled product is built and sold.
Assembled products are displayed individually in reports, so you can track how these items sell individually or when combined with other products.
Assembly Products
Assembly products are made out of individual simple products in your catalog. Assembly products have stock and take the individual items out of stock when you assemble them with an inventory registration act.
This means that an assembly product is a secondary product.
Assembly products are useful even if you do not sell the individual items separately. Having the base products as separate items allows you to add them to purchase orders with ease.
If you do not sell the individual items, set their status to Not for sale. This way they will not show up at the POS.
When you sell out of an assembled product, you will have to re-register more. Erply will alert you if you don’t have enough component to create them.
Example Assembly Product - Gift Basket
To create an assembly product, you first need to create the items that go into it.
In our example we’ll make a Gift Basket. The components of the Gift Basket will be:
- The basket itself
- A coffee mug
- Some hot cocoa mix
- A hat.
Create each of these as items as their own product. Give them a name, a price, a product group, and any other information you would need for these items.
These items should also have stock on them. This means either registering them in, or creating a purchase invoice for them.
You should make sure that your wholesale price and product cost are correct on these items, as they have their own inventory tracking that you will want to be accurate.
Register inventory
Follow the below steps, or check out our inventory registration guide.
In the back office, navigate to Inventory -> Create an Inventory Registration.
Fill out the necessary information such as the location of where your products are going to be registered to, as well as the products and their stock quantities.
Click Confirm on the top right. You can click Save if you want to come back and edit later, but stock quantities do not update until registrations are confirmed.
More info on the difference between Confirming and Saving HERE.
Create the gift basket
In the back office, navigate to PIM -> Manage Product Catalog -> Add a product. Fill in the necessary information such as Name Eng, Product Group, Price ...etc.
Change the Type field from Product to Assembly. Save your product.
In the left side menu, you will now see a button labeled Recipe.
Now, add the items that make up the gift basket along with the amount of items we use to create this assembled product.
In the example, we will add the basket, the hat, the coffee mug, and the hot cocoa
The PIM saves this info automatically.
Register the gift basket
In the back office, navigate to Inventory -> Create an Inventory Registration.
Fill out the necessary information such as the Location of where your gift baskets are going to be registered to, as well as the Product (in this case the gift basket) and their Stock Quantities.
Now there's two things you can do. You can either:
- Register the assembly product by itself, if you have already assembled them in the past.
- Assemble the product from the “ingredients”.
The difference between these two lies in the left side menu. If you'd like to move the stock from the individual ingredient products into the assembly product, you need to activate the Assemble button.
If you simply want to add the full assembled product into your inventory, leave it unticked.
In this example, we will tick the box, because we just created the gift baskets.
Review and click Confirm when done.
Make sure the stock has moved
Now, since we chose to assemble the gift baskets in the inventory registration act, we should be able to verify the stock's movement from the stock cards of the individual ingredient products.
In the back office, navigate to Inventory -> Inventory. Find the ingredient products. Here, we will search for the coffee mug's stock levels.
Search your stock by either the product code or the product name.
When you click on the product, it opens up to the product card of the old PIM, to the Inventory tab. In the bottom menu, click on Warehouse Report.
This shows every document associated with the product. From here we see that Inventory Registration 7 (the name of the document we created earlier) has moved coffee mugs out of inventory.
That means that everything went correctly and the assembly products are now ready to be sold.