Six assembly lines running. Nobody knew which ones were going to finish on time.
How a make-to-order manufacturer replaces whiteboards and clipboards with scanner-native component picking, multi-station kit receiving, and Acumatica Assembly Orders that post themselves.
This is a composite scenario, not a customer. The operation described is assembled from implementations across make-to-order light manufacturing, with the identifying details removed. There are no performance figures on this page because we do not publish numbers we cannot attribute to a named customer.
What is real is the workflow: every step below is what the software actually does, and you can verify all of it in a twenty-minute demo.
Committed before build
Components move to per-order staging and hit Acumatica at batch close.
FEFO at receive
Finished kits decrement the right lots automatically.
Assembly Order at transfer
Created and released in Acumatica with nobody touching the ERP.
Every kit unique. Every late delivery visible to a customer.
A make-to-order light manufacturer producing custom electrical assemblies, wiring harnesses and equipment kits for industrial customers. Six concurrent assembly lines, over fifty production and warehouse staff, building to spec against customer Sales Orders — every kit unique, every BOM material, every late delivery visible to a customer.
They run Acumatica. Their assembly tracking is a whiteboard, a clipboard, and whoever happens to be standing near the production supervisor when a question comes up.
The kits exist. The ERP doesn't know yet.
Sixty kits are built and boxed by mid-morning, and not one of them can ship until the last of the four hundred is finished and someone closes the order. Component quantities get worked out on a clipboard, staging either runs dry or buries the aisle, and when two benches work the same run nobody can say afterwards which bench built what.
Acumatica inventory reflects production as it is remembered rather than as it happens — Assembly Orders get keyed at end of shift, or when the supervisor has a free minute, which on a bad day is the next morning.
And status is a walk. To find out whether line four will finish today, somebody goes and looks, and by the time they are back the answer is out of date.
Scanner-native from the component pick to the Assembly Order.
Component and finished-goods staging locations are created per kit order on first scanner access — no setup, no location maintenance. A picker tells the scanner how many kits to stage and WMSi does the BOM maths, directing every component pick to the right bin. At session close, a Transfer Order per component batch posts to Acumatica, so the components are committed in the ERP before an assembler starts.
Staging is kept level by Top Off: set the staging level once, and after each batch WMSi works out what is missing and sends pickers to refill it. Staging neither runs dry mid-run nor buries the aisle in a week of components.
Each bench runs its own Kit Receiving Session against a shared component pool, so any number of stations can work the same run and each one is tracked independently. Recording finished kits consumes components by first-expiry-first-out automatically — no manual BOM maths and no over-consumption.
Kit Transfer is the moment everything lands. Finished kits move to warehouse inventory in any quantity, at any time, and each transfer creates and releases an Acumatica Assembly Order at the correct warehouse location, with the Assembly Order number stamped back onto the receiving session. A transfer covering work from several stations distributes the Assembly Order across each contributing station session.
In prose: staging a kit order posts a Transfer Order to Acumatica for the component batch; a station records finished kits and the components are consumed first-expiry-first-out; and the transfer creates and releases an Acumatica Assembly Order without a supervisor opening the ERP. Document numbers are illustrative.
Scanner screen for this workflow: [SCREENSHOT — kit receiving session]
The supervisor stops walking the floor to get status.
Build state moves from the floor to a screen. Component staging levels, finished kit counts and per-station progress across every line are visible in the manager portal, updated as scanner events arrive. A stalled build shows up as a staging imbalance before it shows up as a missed ship date.
Manual Assembly Order entry stops existing. Every Kit Transfer creates and releases the Assembly Order at the moment of transfer — not at end of shift, not when the supervisor has a free minute. Acumatica inventory reflects production as it happens rather than as it is remembered.
Lot traceability becomes a query instead of a project. Every component scan records the lot, the source location and the kit order, so the chain from supplier lot to finished kit exists in Acumatica's Transfer Order and Assembly Order records without anyone cross-referencing paper.
| Area | What it becomes |
|---|---|
| Build visibility | Every active Kit Order visible in the manager portal. No floor walk. |
| Assembly Orders | Created and released in Acumatica at Kit Transfer. No supervisor entry. |
| Lot traceability | Component lot → finished kit captured at every scan event. |
| ERP timing | Inventory reflects production as it happens, not at end of shift. |
Ten mechanisms, all of them demonstrable.
- Per-kit-order staging locations created automatically on first scanner access
- Pick for N kits, with the BOM maths done by the scanner
- Top Off rolling buffers that keep staging level between batches
- A Transfer Order posted to Acumatica per component batch at session close
- Per-station Kit Receiving Sessions against a shared component pool
- Per-station attribution, distributed across the Assembly Orders WMSi posts
- FEFO component lot consumption on recording finished kits
- Partial kit transfers in any quantity, at any time, without closing the order
- Assembly Order created and released at Kit Transfer, its number stamped back on the session
- Live component, kit and per-station counts in the manager portal
The three modules this scenario runs on.
Kitting & assembly
Partial transfers, multiple stations and continuous staging — each transfer posts and releases an Acumatica Assembly Order without waiting for the order to close.
How kitting works PlatformManager portal
Component staging levels, finished kit counts and per-station progress across every line, updated as scanner events arrive.
See the manager portal PlatformInventory & lot history
Every component scan records the lot, source location and kit order, so the chain from supplier lot to finished kit is a query rather than a reconstruction.
How inventory worksRecognize this floor?
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