Inventory Visibility reservations
This article describes a typical use case for soft reservations and explains how to set them up in Inventory Visibility. It includes information about how to create soft reservations, offset them upon physical consumption, and adjust or unreserve specified inventory quantities.
In Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management version 10.0.33 or later, you can make soft reservations from sales orders. When you soft reserve from sales orders, the reservation requests are posted to Inventory Visibility, and the available-for-reservation quantities are validated in Inventory Visibility.
Important
The default soft reservation configuration has evolved through various version iterations. Therefore, it's possible that your sandbox environment was initially set up with an outdated default configuration, whereas your production environment was initialized with the latest version of the default configuration. If you've customized your third-party system based on an outdated default configuration, it might encounter issues when your production environment goes live, especially if you haven't reviewed and adjusted the configuration. To help prevent this scenario, we recommend that you thoroughly review and update your draft and runtime configurations before you transition your production environment.
Sample use case for soft reservation
Soft reservations help organizations achieve a single source of truth for available inventory, especially during the order fulfillment process. This functionality is useful for organizations where the following conditions exist:
- The organization has at least two different systems that are directly taking outbound orders.
- The organization is very strict and wants to prevent double-booking of product inventory, which can happen if multiple systems are able to overbook the last piece of stock. This situation is prevented when all order systems can make instant soft reservation API calls to Inventory Visibility, which provides a single source of truth for inventory availability.
The previous illustration shows how soft reservation works and highlights the following operations:
- Your initial inventory level is synced to Inventory Visibility from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management.
- Soft reservations are posted from each of your order channels or systems to Inventory Visibility. Inventory Visibility validates inventory availability and tries to make a soft reservation. If soft reservation succeeds, Inventory Visibility adds to the soft reserved quantity, deducts from the available for reservation (AFR) quantity, and respond with a soft reservation ID.
- At this time, your physical inventory quantity remains the same.
- You can then sync either single or aggregated soft-reserved orders (order lines) into Supply Chain Management to make hard reservations and release to the warehouse or update the final inventory quantity.
- You can set the system to offset soft reservations when physical inventory is updated in Supply Chain Management.
Soft reservations are usually created, consumed, and canceled by using API calls to the Inventory Visibility service.
Note
You can optionally set up Supply Chain Management (and other third-party systems) to automatically offset the quantity that has been reserved by using Inventory Visibility. The offset quantity is deleted from the reservation records in Inventory Visibility.
By default, the offset function is automatically turned on when you enable the soft reservation feature.
Turn on and set up the reservation feature in UI version 2
This section and its subsections apply when you're using Inventory Visibility UI version 2.
Turn on the reservation feature
Follow these steps to turn on the reservation feature in UI version 2.
Sign in to your Power Apps environment, and open the Inventory Visibility app.
On the navigation pane, select Soft Reservation.
On the Data source settings tile, select Manage.
Set the Enable feature option to True.
The Filter unconfigured dimensions option controls how the system behaves if a user submits reservation requests that include dimensions that aren't specified on the Reservation dimensions FastTab. (For more information, see the Configure reservation mappings and dimensions section of this article.) Select one of the following values:
- True – Reservation requests that include dimensions that aren't defined on the Reservation dimensions FastTab succeed, but undefined dimensions are ignored.
- False – Reservation requests that include dimensions that aren't defined on the Reservation dimensions FastTab fail.
Important
If you've enabled the Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines feature in Supply Chain Management, you must set the Filter unconfigured dimensions option to True. For more information, see the Integrate soft reservations and offsets with Supply Chain Management section.
On the toolbar, select Save.
If you changed the setting of the Filter unconfigured dimensions option, you must reverse all existing reservations to preserve data consistency. Use the clean up reservation data API to clean up existing soft reservation records.
Configure reservation mappings and dimensions
When you make a reservation, you might want to know whether on-hand inventory is currently available for reservation. The validation is linked to a calculated measure that represents a computation formula of a combination of physical measures.
By setting up the mapping from a physical measure to a calculated measure, you enable the Inventory Visibility service to automatically validate reservation availability based on the physical measure.
Important
All the physical measures and calculated measures that you plan to map for each data source must already be defined for your system. For information about how to configure measures and data sources, see Configure Inventory Visibility.
Default reservation mappings are provided out of the box. You can review and use these mappings directly. You also add your own mappings by following these steps.
Sign in to your Power Apps environment, and open the Inventory Visibility app.
Define all the data sources, physical measures, and calculated measures that you plan to use with the soft reservations feature. For instructions, see Configure Inventory Visibility. Here are some guidelines for the setup of typically required measures:
- Define the physical measure that serves as the soft reservation measure (for example, SoftReservPhysical).
- Define the available for reservation calculated measure that contains the available-for-reservation computation formula that you'll map to the physical measure. For example, you might set up AvailableToReserve (available for reservation) so that it's mapped to the previously defined SoftReservPhysical physical measure. In this way, you can find which quantities that have the SoftReservPhysical inventory status will be available for reservation.
The following table shows the available-for-reservation computation formula.
Calculation type Data source Physical measure Addition fno AvailPhysical Addition pos Inbound Subtraction pos Outbound Subtraction iv SoftReservPhysical We recommend that you set up the physical measure that the reservation measure is based on as a component of the calculated measure. In this way, the calculated measure quantity is affected by the reservation quantity. For example, use the SoftReservPhysical physical measure of the iv data source as a component of the AvailableToReserve calculated measure of the iv data source.
In the Reservation mapping section, set up the mapping from the physical measure to the calculated measure. For the previous example, you might use the following settings to map AvailableToReserve to the previously defined SoftReservPhysical physical measure:
- Physical measure data source: iv
- Physical measure: SoftReservPhysical
- Available for reservation data source: iv
- Available for reservation calculated measure: AvailableToReserve
Now, when you do reservation on SoftReservPhysical, Inventory Visibility automatically finds AvailableToReserve and its related computation formula to do the reservation validation.
In the Reservation dimensions section, set up all the product dimensions that might be specified when a reservation is made. Each reservation dimension must contain a partition configuration.
Here's an example of reservation dimensions.
Key Hierarchy SiteId 1 LocationId 2 ColorId 3 SizeId 4 StyleId 5 In this example, the partition schema is ByLocation, and the basic partition dimension is (SiteId, LocationId).
On the toolbar, select Save.
Example available-for-reservation calculation
The following example shows how the Inventory Visibility API might report on-hand inventory information.
{
"productId": "D0002",
"dimensions": {
"SiteId": "1",
"LocationId": "11",
"ColorId": "Red"
},
"quantities": {
"iv": {
"SoftReservPhysical": 90
},
"fno": {
"availphysical": 70.0,
},
"pos": {
"inbound": 50.0,
"outbound": 20.0
}
}
}
In this case, the following available-for-reservation calculation applies:
AvailableToReserve = fno.availphysical + pos.inbound – pos.outbound – iv.SoftReservPhysical
= 70 + 50 – 20 – 90
= 10
Therefore, if you try to make reservations on iv.SoftReservPhysical, and the quantity is less than or equal to AvailableToReserve (10), the soft reservation request succeeds.
Turn on and set up the reservation feature in UI version 1
This section applies when you're using Inventory Visibility UI version 1.
To turn on and set up the reservation feature UI version 1, follow these steps.
- Sign in to your Power Apps environment, and open the Inventory Visibility app.
- On the Change area menu at the bottom of the navigation pane, select Legacy UI.
- On the navigation pane, select Configuration.
- On the Feature management & settings tab, use the option to turn on the Soft reservation feature.
- Select the Soft reservation tab.
- Open the Configuration page.
- If you plan to receive soft reservation data from Supply Chain Management, select the Use soft reservation for sales order in FinOps checkbox.
- On the Soft Reservation tab, review the default soft reservation hierarchy. Add new dimensions to the hierarchy as you require. For more information about how to work with the soft reservation hierarchy, see the Configure reservation mappings and dimensions section.
- In the Set Soft Reservation Mapping section, review the default settings. For more information about soft reservation mappings and the required measures, see the Configure reservation mappings and dimensions section.
Create soft reservations using the Inventory Visibility API
When you call the reservation API, the system marks the reservation of the specified goods and quantities.
For example, the company Contoso sells product D0002 (Cabinet) from its e-commerce website. A customer places a sales order for a small red cabinet via the website. Contoso decides to fulfill this order by using the following dimensions:
- Organization ID = usmf
- Site = 1
- Warehouse = 11
- Product = D0002
- Color = red
- Size = small
Contoso has already set up an API connection to Inventory Visibility from its own e-commerce system. When the order is received, the system instantly triggers an API call to make a soft reservation for the cabinet in Inventory Visibility.
Reservations are made in the Inventory Visibility service by submitting a POST request to the service's URL, such as /api/environment/{environmentId}/onhand/reserve.
For a reservation, the request body must contain an organization ID, a product ID, reserved quantities, and dimensions.
When you call the reservation API, you can control the reservation validation by specifying the Boolean ifCheckAvailForReserv parameter in the request body. A value of True means that the validation is required, whereas a value of False means that the validation isn't required. The default value is True.
If you want to cancel a reservation or unreserve specified inventory quantities, set the quantity to a negative value, and set the ifCheckAvailForReserv parameter to False to skip the validation.
Here's an example of the request body that references the sales order in the previous context.
# Url
# Replace {endpoint} with your system endpoint.
{endpoint}/api/environment/{environmentId}/onhand/reserve
# Method
Post
# Header
# replace {access_token} with the one get from security service
Api-version: "1.0"
Content-Type: "application/json"
Authorization: "Bearer {access_token}"
# Body
{
"id": "Testrequest",
"organizationId": "usmf",
"productId": "D0002",
"dimensions": {
"SiteId": "1",
"LocationId": "11",
"ColorId": "red",
"SizeId": "small"
},
"quantityDataSource": "iv",
"modifier": "softreserved",
"quantity": 1,
"ifCheckAvailForReserv": true
}
All dimensions must be defined in your reservation dimensions configuration and must contain the partition for the product. Here are examples of feasible dimension combinations that use the default configuration:
(SiteId, LocationId)(SiteId, LocationId, SizeId)(SiteId, LocationId, ColorId, SizeId)(SiteId, LocationId, ColorId, SizeId, StyleId)
Note
Reservations on different dimension levels are independent. For example, your defined reservation dimensions are (SiteId, LocationId, ColorId, SizeId). If you reserve some quantity for one product at dimension level (SiteId, LocationId, ColorId), reservations at other levels, such as (Site , Location , Color , Size) or (Site , Location), aren't affected.
A successful soft reservation request returns a soft reservation ID for each reservation record. The soft reservation ID isn't a unique identifier for an individual soft reservation record, but a combination of the product ID and dimension values that are associated with the soft reservation request. You can record the soft reservation ID on the order line when you sync the successfully reserved orders to Supply Chain Management or another ERP system for offset.
Integrate soft reservations and offsets with Supply Chain Management
You can trigger a soft reservation from a Supply Chain Management sales order and then make an offset back to Inventory Visibility when the order lines are hard reserved (that is, changed to a status of Reserve physical, Reserve ordered, Picked, and so on). The process differs slightly, depending on the soft reservation feature that you're using (Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset or Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines).
Turn on the feature in Supply Chain Management
Sign in to Supply Chain Management, and make sure that you've enabled one of the following two features in Feature management. Don't enable both features.
- Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset – This feature requires Supply Chain Management version 10.0.22 or later.
- Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines – This feature is recommended if you're running Supply Chain Management version 10.0.33 or later.
Important
These two features are incompatible with each other. Therefore, enable only one of them. We recommend that you enable Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines for all new installations that are running Supply Chain Management version 10.0.33 or later. If you're already using the Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset feature, you can continue to use it if you don't have to make direct soft reservations from Supply Chain Management sales orders. However, you can also change to the newer feature if you prefer, provided that you meet the system requirements.
Configure additional settings if the "Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines" feature is enabled
If you enabled the Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines feature, follow these steps to configure additional settings.
In Supply Chain Management, go to Inventory Management > Setup > Inventory Visibility integration parameters.
On the Enable soft reservation tab, in the Default soft reserve block level field, select one of the following values to specify how the system should behave if you try to process sales order lines that no soft reservation exists for in Inventory Visibility:
- Block – You can't process a sales order line to a hard reservation (reserve physical) or further unless Inventory Visibility has already recorded a successful soft reservation for the line.
- Warning – You receive a warning message if you try to process a sales order line to a hard reservation (reserve physical) but no matching soft reservation has been made in Inventory Visibility.
- Ignore – The system doesn't check for a soft reservation in Inventory Visibility when you try to process order lines in Supply Chain Management.
Tip
You don't have to enable or set up the offset modifier, because offset for soft reservation is always enabled and will be triggered when a sales line proceeds to hard reservation status (or further, if the hard reservation step is skipped).
Configure additional settings if the "Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset" feature is enabled
If you enabled the Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset feature, follow these steps to configure additional settings.
In Supply Chain Management, go to Inventory Management > Setup > Inventory Visibility integration parameters.
On the Reservation offset tab, set the following fields:
Enable reservation offset – Set this option to Yes to enable the functionality.
Reservation offset modifier – Select one of the following values to specify the inventory transaction status that offsets reservations that are made in Inventory Visibility. This setting determines the order processing stage that triggers offsets. The stage is traced by the order's inventory transaction status.
- On order – Orders that have a status of On order send an offset request when they're created. The offset quantity is the quantity of the created order (line).
- Reserve – Orders that have a status of Reserve send an offset request when they're either order reserved or physically reserved. When you offset at the Reserve status, the order sends an offset request at any new inventory status that's closest to reserved picked (for example, pick, packing slip posted, or invoiced). This behavior occurs even if you skip the reservation in Supply Chain Management and continue to another inventory status (for example, if you skip from release to warehouse to pick and pack). The request is triggered only once. If it's triggered at pick, the offset isn't duplicated when a packing slip is posted. The offset quantity is the same as the quantity of the inventory transaction status when the offset was triggered (in other words, Reserved ordered/Reserve Physical, or a later status, on the corresponding order line).
Create soft reservations and offsets when you use the Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines feature
When you use the Inventory Visibility integration with soft reservation on sales order lines feature, you can post soft reservations and also offset soft reservations from sales order lines in Supply Chain Management. The offset capabilities in this feature support both internally and externally created sales lines.
Sign in to Supply Chain Management
Go to Sales and marketing > Sales Orders > All Sales Orders.
On the Action Pane, select New to create a sales order.
Fill in the Create sales order dialog box in the usual way, and then select OK to finish creating the new order.
The new order is opened. Enter a sales line. Be sure to specify Product ID, Site, Warehouse, and Quantity values. Specify any other inventory dimension values that are applicable.
There are two ways to make a soft reservation from a sales order. Follow one of these steps:
To soft reserve the whole order, including all lines, select Inventory Visibility integration > Soft reservation on the Action Pane. Then select one of the following options:
- Reserve entire order directly – Make an instant soft reservation API call to Inventory Visibility.
- Reserve entire order by batch – Add the reservation requests to a batch queue that's associated with a batch job that syncs Supply Chain Management with Inventory Visibility about once per minute.
To soft reserve a specific order line, select the sales line, and then select Inventory > Inventory Visibility integration > Soft reserve on the toolbar of the FastTab toolbar to open the Inventory service reservation details dialog box. Then select either to reserve directly or to add the reservation as a batch job. The following information is shown:
- Unreserved – The quantity that wasn't soft reserved.
- Soft reserve success – The quantity that was successfully soft reserved.
- Batch reserve in progress – The quantity that was added to the soft reservation batch queue.
- Direct reserve in progress – The quantity that triggered an instant soft reservation API call to Inventory Visibility.
- Failed - not enough stock – The quantity that couldn't be soft reserved because of unavailable stock.
- Failed - other reason – The quantity that couldn't be soft reserved for another reason, such as a failed API call, connection issues, or other issues.
- Offset quantity – The total offset quantity, including both offset success and in-progress quantities.
- Pending to offset quantity – The quantity that skipped soft reservation and proceeded directly to hard reservation or further physical inventory consumption.
To view and edit the soft reservation status of a sales line, select the line on the Sales order lines FastTab, and then, on the Line details FastTab, select the General tab. If your system is set to block or warn when a soft reservation couldn't be made, you might see a block notice here. To help avoid the risk of overselling, we strongly recommend that you don't choose to override the soft reservation validation unless overrides are permitted in your business.
When a soft reservation is successfully made, a soft reservation ID is automatically returned and recorded for each sales line.
By default, the soft reservation offset is triggered when the line reaches a hard reservation status (Reserve physical or Reserve ordered) or later. Sales lines that show a valid soft reservation ID and a qualifying trigger status will automatically be added to the offset batch queue.
Note
If you must reverse a successful soft reservation, open the relevant sales order, and then select Revert reservation directly or Revert reservation by batch at the sales order or sales line level.
Import sales orders that have been soft reserved externally
It's likely that your company has other order channels that also post soft reservation to Inventory Visibility. Sales orders that have been soft reserved externally might have to be imported into Supply Chain Management if you're using it as your system of record. Follow these steps to import sales orders that have been soft reserved externally.
Sign in to Supply Chain Management.
Go to System Administration > Work spaces > Data management.
Select the Framework parameters tile.
On the Data import/export framework parameters page, on the Entity settings tab, select Refresh entity list.
Go back to System Administration > Work spaces > Data management.
Select the Export tile.
On the New Record page, in the Group name field, enter a name.
On the Selected entities FastTab, select Add entity on the toolbar, and then, in the drop-down dialog box, set the following values:
- Entity name – Select Sales order lines V2.
- Target data format – Select Excel.
- Select fields – Select Importable fields.
Select Add to apply your settings, and then select Close to close the dialog box.
A new line is added to the grid. On the new line, select the button in the Filter column.
In the Inquiry dialog box, the grid on the Range tab should already have one row. Edit the row so that it has the following values:
- Table – Select Sales order lines V2.
- Derived table – Select Sales order lines V2.
- Field – Select Sales order.
- Criteria – Select any sales order number.
Select OK to apply your settings and close the dialog box.
On the Action Pane, select Export.
On the Execution summary page, on the Entity processing status FastTab, select Download file on the toolbar.
Open the downloaded file in Excel, and remove all the data rows. Leave only the header row.
Add new rows that include the sales order line details that you want to import into Supply Chain Management.
For each row, in addition to the usual order data, be sure to include soft reservation details in the following columns:
- INVENTORYSERVICERESERVATIONID – Enter the soft reservation ID from the external reservation.
- ISSOFTRESERVEDEXTERNALLY – Enter Yes.
Import the completed Excel file. You'll be able to check import status after completion.
After the file is successfully imported, you can confirm that the new sales orders have soft reservation details by opening those orders in Supply Chain Management.
Note
After you import sales orders that include soft reservation details, you won't be able to modify the soft reservation or revert it from Supply Chain Management. If the data that you imported isn't correct, delete the affected sales line, and then re-import it.
Create soft reservations and offsets when you use the Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset feature
When you use the Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset feature, you can't trigger soft reservation directly from Supply Chain Management. Instead, this feature supports only the offset of sales order lines that were created externally from Supply Chain Management. When externally created soft-reserved sales lines are replicated into Supply Chain Management, offsets might be required from Supply Chain Management to Inventory Visibility.
You can offset a soft-reserved quantity after the quantity on an order is physically deducted in Supply Chain Management or another ERP system. Inventory Visibility offers out-of-box soft reservation offset integration with Supply Chain Management.
Follow these steps to offset a soft reservation.
Sign in to Supply Chain Management.
Go to Sales and marketing > Sales Orders > All Sales Orders.
On the Action Pane, select New. Create a new order and a new sales line.
Re-create the external sales order, and add a sales line that uses the same product ID, organization, site, warehouse, and dimensions values.
On the Sales order lines FastTab, select the sales line that you just entered, and then, on the toolbar, select Inventory > Reservation ID.
Follow one of these steps:
- Copy the soft reservation ID in your soft reservation request response, and paste it into the Reservation ID field.
- Leave the Reservation ID field blank, but select the Inventory service auto offset checkbox. The system will automatically determine which product and product dimensions to offset, based on the item ID and dimension values that are entered on the selected line.
Select OK.
While the same sales line is still selected, physically reserve the ordered quantity by selecting Inventory > Reservation on the toolbar of the Sales order lines FastTab.
If you've previously set the Reservation offset modifier field to Reserved, the offset will be triggered when the order line has a status of Reserve physical or Reserve ordered. A batch job runs once a minute to sync offset requests from Supply Chain Management to Inventory Visibility.
Note
For transaction statuses that include a specified reserve offset modifier, the transaction update will offset the corresponding reservation record when all the following conditions are met:
- The reservation ID on the inventory transaction matches the reservation ID of the reservation record in Inventory Visibility.
- The dimensions of the inventory transaction match the dimensions of the reservation record in Inventory Visibility.
- Changes in inventory transaction status trigger offsets for reservations when the inventory transaction status reflects the fact that an order process has been completed or skipped.
Offset quantities follow the inventory quantities that are specified on the relevant inventory transactions. An offset will take effect only if reserved quantity remains in Inventory Visibility.
Check for failed reservation offsets
To check for failed reservation offsets, go to Inventory Management > Periodic tasks > Inventory Visibility integration. A failed offset might be caused by an incorrect soft reservation ID, an internet issue, a broken system connection, and so on.
Cancel or revert a soft reservation
If an original order line is canceled or deleted, and you must revert the corresponding soft reservation, post a negative quantity that has the exact same information in your API query body.
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