Kit Assembly Work Order & Backflush: Keep Component and Kit Balances Honest

The problem this kills

Every time your team assembles a kit, two numbers are supposed to move: the components you consumed go down, and the finished kits you built go up. In a spreadsheet world, somebody has to remember to do that math by hand for every build — multiply the BOM by the quantity built, subtract each component, add the finished kits, and try not to fat-finger anything.

So the counts drift. A build gets recorded twice and your component stock goes negative on paper. A scrapped part never gets subtracted. A line gets substituted on the floor — they grabbed the alternate bracket — and the wrong part gets decremented. Within a few weeks nobody trusts the on-hand numbers, you're stocking out of components you thought you had, and you're counting shelves to figure out what's real. You don't need an expensive MRP system to fix this, and you don't need to be a developer.

What you'll build

A simple internal web tool for kit assembly. You import your BOMs (which components, and how many of each, go into one kit) and your component on-hand quantities. To start a job you release a work order: pick the kit, the quantity to build, and a scrap allowance. The floor assembles it. When it's done, someone enters the actual built quantity and the actual scrap, and notes any component substitutions that happened. The tool calculates the exact inventory moves — every component to decrement (including scrap), and the finished kits to add. Your assembly lead opens the work order, checks the numbers against what really happened, and clicks Approve backflush. Only then does the tool write the moves: components down, kits up. It exports those moves as a clean CSV in the exact columns your system of record expects, and logs who did what and when. The same work order can never be backflushed twice.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

The downloadable plan is a step-by-step file you paste into an AI coding agent. It opens by interviewing you about your business — how you build kits today, where your BOMs and on-hand counts live, exactly how your SKUs and component codes are named, your typical and peak build volumes, how you handle scrap and substitutions, and your messiest edge cases — and then it tailors the data model, the validations, and every later step to your answers. This is not a generic template; the agent reflects a short spec back to you and waits for your thumbs-up before it builds anything. From there it walks the agent through importing BOMs and on-hand, releasing a work order, capturing built quantity and scrap, computing the backflush, the lead's review-and-approve screen, writing the inventory moves, and exporting the CSV — each step with a ready-to-copy prompt. There's also a fallback so you can build and run the whole thing today even with no API into your existing inventory system.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This is real inventory tooling, so it ships with the controls a warehouse team needs: login so only your team can use it, row-level security so you only ever see your own organization's work orders and stock, a complete audit trail of who released, built, approved, and exported each work order and when, a hard human-approval gate so no inventory move is written until a lead confirms the actual built quantity and scrap, and duplicate guards keyed on the work-order ID so the same build can never be backflushed twice. Substitutions are recorded explicitly so the right component gets decremented, not the one the BOM assumed.

Who it's for

Kitting and assembly leads and inventory-control folks who own the gap between "we built some kits" and "the system knows it." If you can describe how a kit gets built on your floor and where your BOMs live, you can build this.

You've got this — start with the plan, paste the first prompt, answer the interview, and you'll release your first work order and watch the backflush balance the same afternoon.