Scenarios and solutions to industry pain points
Now that you've learned basic information about the Inventory Visibility Add-in, you might be wondering how your company can apply it to their business practices. The following scenarios explain how your business could use the service.
Large produce company
In this scenario, you work for a large produce company that provides fruits and vegetables to several grocery stores around the country/region. One of your highest priorities is getting your viable, on-hand inventory out to customers due to the limited shelf life of your produce. However, as a large produce company, you'll likely have several external systems for order management, inventory, or for your ERP system.
Generally, keeping an accurate on-hand inventory count would be cumbersome across all the platforms. This situation is where the Inventory Visibility service would help your company. Its RESTful APIs will allow you to connect your external systems to the service so that you can enjoy near real-time inventory counts across all your systems. Moreover, the inventory adjustments that are made in your systems will be accounted for in Inventory Visibility.
Artisan clothing company
For this scenario, your company works with designer clothing that's made by highly skilled tailors who use fine fabrics. Your materials are expensive and tend to be used quickly because you have a high volume of orders coming in from your brick-and-mortar locations. Due to high demand and scarcity of materials, you'll want to have an accurate count of products and materials for your near-future availability projections. This situation is where your company would find value in the Inventory Visibility service.
The service has a feature that provides accessible available-to-promise quantities and dates. Therefore, you'll be able to determine what you have and what's needed for your near-future fulfillments. Furthermore, your sales clerks could benefit from being able to accurately calculate shipment and delivery dates for customers while they're in the store. As a result, the customers would know when an item will be next available, if it currently isn't.
Manufacturing company
In this scenario, you work for a manufacturing company. Your company has external order management and ERP systems. However, to avoid oversell, you need real-time availability for inventory so that you have enough materials to manufacture your products. You might find the latency that's involved in processing orders from your external systems can make you susceptible to oversell because you're unaware of true inventory availability.
However, this problem is resolved with Inventory Visibility. The service has a soft reservations feature that will allow your external systems to flag inventory on orders so that it's deducted from your available inventory. With this feature, you can account for subsequent orders without having to wait for your transactions to sync with your ERP system.