Moving picking errors out of the assembly cell and into a controlled kitting process is one of the cheapest quality improvements available. Most plants still leave it on the table.
Ask where assembly errors are made and most people point at the workbench. Trace them properly and a large share began earlier — the wrong part picked from a look-alike bin, the superseded revision still living in line-side stock, the shortage discovered halfway through a build. The bench inherits these errors; it rarely creates them.
Kitting attacks the problem at its source. Instead of surrounding an assembler with hundreds of open bins, a controlled process picks exactly one product’s parts into one carrier, checked against the BOM, before the work order starts. The assembler’s error space collapses: if the kit is right and the kit is empty at the end, the build used the right parts.
The checking is what separates kitting from re-shelving. Our kits are picked against the current BOM revision by scan, not memory, with count verification on small parts by weighing. A kit that passes these gates carries a label tying it to the work order and the BOM revision it was picked against — which is the start of traceability, not just tidiness.
Kitting also finds shortages while they are still a planning problem. A missing component discovered at kitting, days before the build slot, is an expedite. The same shortage discovered mid-assembly is a torn-down workstation, a half-built unit in quarantine and a schedule hole. Same part, very different cost.
The objection is always labour: kitting looks like paying someone to move parts twice. The honest comparison is against what it removes — picking errors at the bench, mid-build stoppages, line-side inventory counts, and the rework chain each wrong part triggers. On assembled products with meaningful BOMs, we have yet to see the arithmetic favour open bins.
For buyers sourcing assemblies, the question to ask a supplier is concrete: how do parts physically reach your bench? A supplier who kits per work order, with scan verification against revision-controlled BOMs, has engineered a whole error class out of your product. A supplier pointing at a wall of open bins has left it in.
— GANI Contract Manufacturing engineering team