Overview of Inventory Visibility
Inventory Visibility is a microservice that gives companies the ability to have real-time, on-hand inventory change postings and visibility tracking across all data sources and channels. The service provides a platform through which you can manage your global inventory by using some of the following functionalities:
Connect your external data sources, such as order management systems, external enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, point-of-sale systems, or warehouse management systems, to the Inventory Visibility service to centrally track inventory status across all your data sources.
Get real-time, on-hand stock availability and shortage information by querying the Inventory Visibility service.
Avoid overselling and manage inventory allocation for your different channels by making real-time soft reservations.
Streamline promised order and customer expectation management by providing precise current or next-available inventory dates. This approach allows the omnichannel available-to-promise feature to determine expected order fulfillment dates.
Extensible and scalable
Consider a scenario where your company is new to the Microsoft ecosystem regarding their supply chain and order management systems. If that's the case, you might have several external services in regard to supply chain management, order management, or procurement. With the Inventory Visibility service, this scenario isn't a problem.
With Inventory Visibility, your external systems can connect to the service through RESTful APIs. While out-of-the-box mapping is available for the Supply Chain Management data source and dimensions, you can also integrate your external systems into Inventory Visibility by setting up extra data sources and dimensions. Furthermore, the Inventory Visibility service is built on Microsoft Dataverse. As a result, you can use data in the service to build and integrate with apps from Microsoft Power Apps and use Microsoft Power BI to create your own dashboards that fit your various business needs.
Concerning the scale of your business, you can scale the Inventory Visibility service to your data volume. Because this scalability is based on automatic detection and assessment of your transaction data volume, you can enjoy a scalable, near-effortless experience.
Real-time global inventory visibility and unified inventory adjustment
Inventory Visibility provides great value to your daily operational business by enabling access to accurate, real-time inventory quantities across all your channels, locations, and warehouses. Physical on-hand inventory, quantities sold, and quantities purchased are available out of the box, but you can also set up other physical inventory statuses (such as returned or quarantined) according to your business needs. Inventory Visibility can process and aggregate millions of inventory change posts by the second or minute that your data is posted. It also allows external systems to call its API to post inventory changes. As a result, these changes immediately take effect, are viewable in the service, and on-hand inventory is deducted accordingly.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility public APIs.
Soft reservations
Consider a scenario where your company has channels or data sources that exist outside of your system-of-record ERP system. In that situation, you can use soft reservations before other features to better fulfill your orders to these customers or channels. A soft reservation allows you to assign or flag specific quantities to fulfill an order or demand. While soft reservations don't affect physical inventory, they do deduct from the available for reservation inventory quantity, meaning that the quantity for future order fulfillment is updated.
Without the use of soft reservations in the Inventory Visibility service, your order must be synced to and processed by your ERP system to get a physical inventory quantity update. Conversely, soft reservations provide immediate inventory quantity updates whenever a sales request or order is made from one of your channels. This component can help you prevent oversell scenarios by enforcing inventory amounts as orders reach the ERP system. Soft reservations also help you fulfill all your promised orders, helping you meet your customer expectations and retain loyalty.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility reservations.
Access to available-to-promise quantity and dates
Your company might find value in having some visibility into your near-future projected inventory. Having insight into your supply, demand, and projected on-hand details will add great value in several areas. For instance, it can help minimize your inventory levels by promoting the use of inventory as soon as it's available, thus reducing your inventory management costs.
Additionally, it can help facilitate internal order processing. If salespeople are able to calculate shipment and delivery dates accurately, they can handle more on their end. You can also use it to manage customer expectations by providing the next-available date for out-of-stock items.
You can implement the available-to-promise feature within your current daily order fulfillment process. As with other aspects of Inventory Visibility, the available-to-promise feature provides global and real-time insights into inventory. As a result, you can set up available-to-promise calculation formulas across all your business channels and data sources, regardless of whether they're part of Dynamics 365 or not.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility on-hand change schedules and available to promise.
Inventory allocation
Inventory Visibility has an allocation feature that allows you to protect or pre-allocate on-hand stock for important channels, customer groups, or locations. When the stock is allocated, inventory consumption is restricted to the specified pool, and the quantities remaining in the pool are deducted in near-real time to accurately reflect the quantity that's still available for use.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility inventory allocation.
Compatible with warehouse management items
Inventory Visibility also features an out-of-the-box integration with warehouse management in Supply Chain Management.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility support for WMS items.
Integrate Inventory Visibility with Dynamics 365 Commerce
You can integrate Dynamics 365 Commerce with Inventory Visibility for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to connect important inventory changes associated with commerce to Inventory Visibility. This allows any changes made to inventory or real-time inventory requests made from a commerce channel to be reflected and acquired from the Inventory Visibility in real time.