How Our Manufacturing Kitting and Subassembly Services Simplify Your Production Process

All Metals Fabricating excels at manufacturing individual parts, but for many customers, that is only one step toward getting a finished product into the field. When parts arrive individually, the customer has to do all the receiving and inventory work before assembly even begins.

Our kitting and subassembly services can simplify that process. Customers can shift much of the work to a trusted contract manufacturing partner and receive components in the form that best supports their operations, whether that means completed subassemblies or organized kits that make your assembly process faster and easier.

How Kitting and Subassembly Services Work

In kitting, we group everything needed to build a unit into a single, organized package. We combine the parts we fabricate with purchased components, hardware, and assembly instructions, then we label and arrange them so they’re easy to assemble on arrival. Subassembly services take that even further by assembling selected parts together before shipment.

We provide these services in any industry, with telecommunications representing one of our largest kitting markets. For example, a telecom equipment shroud may require fabricated metal parts, radios, fans, fasteners, and other items. We can supply the fabricated parts, then organize the hardware into clearly defined sub-kits and add assembly instructions. Now, the customer can easily complete the shroud.

Reducing Work Throughout a Customer’s Facility

Without kitting, a customer might receive 50 units of one part, 50 of another, and separate containers of hardware. Employees must receive and inspect each item, place it into inventory, retrieve it later, and confirm that the correct components reach the assembly area together.

Kitting consolidates those steps. Employees handle fewer inventory items and spend far less time organizing. 

Subassemblies create even greater time savings because they remove more assembly work and eliminate the chances that a misplaced part or piece of hardware will leave a unit incomplete. Inspection can be reduced, as well, because in many cases the customer only has to inspect the completed assembly for fit, function, and finish instead of inspecting every part separately.

Kitting and subassembly services will typically add to a quoted price, but they can lower your total cost by reducing your internal labor. To evaluate the return, you should look beyond piece price to the time and resources saved, as well as the simpler logistics.

Planning Kits Around the Final Application

Effective kitting needs dedicated planning from the beginning. Customers must be clear with us about how the product will be assembled and how the completed kits will move through their operation.

If a bill of materials contains 50 pieces of hardware, placing all of them into a single bag won’t simplify the process much for an assembler or installer. Instead, we want to divide that hardware into labeled sub-kits for individual assembly steps; that makes kitting far more useful. 

Understanding shipping requirements is just as important. If kits will be sent individually to different installation sites or shipped in varying quantities, it might be best for us to box each one separately. That saves the customer from having to re-box the components before shipping them to the job site.

Defining these requirements takes additional work early in the program. But it gets the best results from the kitting or subassembly process.

Quality in Every Kit

Quality assurance is critical when a single missing piece of hardware can stop an entire assembly from being completed. And that’s even more of a problem if you’re at a remote job site where it may be hard to locate a replacement.

We stage the exact required quantity of each component before we start our kitting. If any pieces remain after the kits have been completed, the team knows there may be an error and we reinspect the order. 

This simple control has led to very successful results. For instance, for one telecom customer, All Metals Fabricating has shipped thousands of kits and subassemblies without a rejection.

Simplify Your Assembly

Kitting works best when we can collaborate with a metal fabrication or machining customer early to understand the details of your project and tailor a plan to your needs. And with the right plan, kits and subassemblies reduce handling and simplify the next steps of your project.

Request a quote from All Metals Fabricating to discuss kitting and subassembly support for your next program.