Light the bin, confirm the pick, record the kit
Pull and order from your ERP, guide each pick with a light at the bin, confirm it by scan or by weight, and write a record of what actually went into the kit. Operators stop matching part numbers by eye.
A kit that's one part short usually gets discovered at the assembly station, where someone is now waiting on it, or after it ships and comes back as a return claim. The problem is discovered downstream, while the pick that caused it happened hours earlier at the bench.
In high-mix work the contents change by order, option, or customer, and the parts that go in often differ from each other by a character or two in a part number. The operator reads the list, finds the bin they think matches, and trusts their own eyes.
Kitting can take hours and sits directly in front of assembly, so time lost at the bench comes off your throughput. A completed pick list confirms the kit got built and tells you nothing about how long each part took to find.
A Tulip kitting app runs the pick sequence at the station, lighting the bin for each part and holding the operator at the step until the pick is confirmed. It pulls the order and the bill of materials from ERP so the kit is built against the right revision, and it records every pick as it happens.
Building the Kitting App
Build the pick sequence as a series of steps in Tulip, with the part image, the quantity, and the bin location on each one. Add logic with when-if-then triggers so a substitution, a shortage, or a failed check routes the operator somewhere sensible.
Pick-to-Light Guidance
The Tulip Light Kit drives eight channels of LED strip from an Edge device, so the app can light one bin at a time, light a group of bins for a multi-part pick, and change colour to signal a different action. Where a rack gets rearranged, the bin mapping is app configuration.
Pick Verification
Tulip checks that the operator picked the right part before letting them move on. Scan the part's barcode, weigh it on a connected scale, or use a camera to confirm the right bin was emptied. If the check fails, the app holds the operator on that step until it's put right.
Pull Directly From the BOM
Pull the work order and its bill of materials from ERP so the kit list is up-to-date and nobody is working from a printout. Tulip connects to SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion Cloud, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Acumatica, with the connector extended to reach the endpoints your workflow needs.
Kit Records and Analysis
Each completed kit records who built it, at which station, on which app version, and how long every step took. The parts themselves land on the record as data you capture in the app. When a kit turns out wrong you can trace it to the pick, and across a shift you can see which part is slowest to find.
Customer stories
See how manufacturers guide each pick, verify the part, and keep incomplete kits from reaching assembly.
Laerdal assembles medical training devices from kits and was running the process on paper. It now error-proofs kit assembly with vision verification at the station, reporting zero defects or parts omitted across thousands of kits assembled, along with less time spent processing return claims.
Sharp Packaging runs complex, highly regulated clinical trial packaging where the contents change by protocol. Digitizing the workflow and the data capture around it made the packaging process 30% faster, with fewer errors and a clearer compliance position.
Kitting software guides an operator through assembling a set of parts into a kit, verifies each pick, and records what went in. It replaces a printed pick list with a sequence on a screen at the station, where the software knows which bin holds the part, confirms the operator took the right one, and won't let an incomplete kit pass as finished. In manufacturing the kit usually feeds an assembly operation or ships as a finished set, so a missing part turns into a stopped line or a return.
The kitting process in Tulip runs as an app: a sequence of steps built in the App Editor, one per pick or one per group of picks, showing the part image, the quantity, and the bin. The app pulls the order and its bill of materials from ERP so the list is current. As the operator works, connected devices confirm each pick and the app holds them at the step until the confirmation lands. When the kit closes, the app writes a completion record. A process engineer builds and owns the app, so changing it after a BOM revision doesn't need a ticket.
Yes. Tulip has connectors for SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion Cloud, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, Dynamics Business Central, and Acumatica, and the usual build pulls the work order and its bill of materials in at the start of the kit. Set expectations on the work involved: the named-vendor connectors are starting points, so plan on extending one with functions for the specific endpoints your workflow needs, and on some configuration on the ERP side. Connectors require Professional plans and above. Older SAP ECC installations need intermediary middleware because they don't expose native REST APIs, and only S/4HANA and Business One connect directly. For systems that can't be reached from the internet, an on-premise connector host runs inside your network and connects outbound to Tulip.
High-variance work tends to be where it fits best. Because the kit list comes from the order, adding a variant changes the data and leaves the app alone. Conditional logic in the app handles the differences: a step that appears only for one configuration, a substitution path when a part is short, a different verification method for a part that has no barcode. Only published versions run at a station, and a revision reaches the station after the kit in progress finishes, so nobody gets switched mid-pick.
Yes, through a step you build into the app. Tulip provides an Untrained Operator Error Step Template that you insert into a production app, and it queries the training table for that operator and that reference, then either lets them continue or shows an error. Since the check reads the qualification record at runtime, an expired status blocks the job the same way a missing one does. Because it's a step you place, you decide which operations are gated and at what point in the sequence the check happens.
Because the verification and the record are the same thing. The scan that confirms a pick is what proves the kit was built correctly, so you aren't running a guidance system and a traceability system side by side and reconciling them. The app is built by the process engineer who owns the kitting bench, which shortens the distance between noticing a problem at the station and having a fix running there. And the same platform carries the assembly the kit feeds, so a kit record and a build record sit on one data model. Tulip is certified to ISO 9001:2015, maintains a SOC 2 Type II report, and supports SAML single sign-on with SCIM provisioning.
Bring a kit list and see what the app looks like: the bin lit, the pick confirmed, and the record it leaves behind.