Set up data integration
To effectively transfer data between external systems and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, your organization must configure data integrations. Integrations between document data, master data, and progress data are crucial to efficiently run a warehouse.
Inbound and outbound shipment order messages
Your organization can use inbound and outbound shipment order messages to communicate with Supply Chain Management about the physical inventory that it plans to receive and ship. These messages contain header and line data.
Supply Chain Management exchanges these messages between systems through lightweight inbound and outbound shipment order documents. These documents replace several other document types that people typically use in Supply Chain Management, such as sales orders, purchase orders, and transfer orders. This approach offers several advantages, including simplified integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and order management systems. It also allows you to activate Supply Chain Management warehouse management capabilities to integrate with a wide range of external ERP and order management systems.
You can exchange inbound and outbound shipment order messages through Microsoft Dataverse or through Open Data Protocol (OData) by using shipment order message entities. Additionally, you can exchange them by using the Data management import process, such as with the Inbound shipment order messages composite entity or the Outbound shipment order messages composite entity.
Supply Chain Management queues incoming documents and processes them with the message processor, ensuring consistent data between systems for principal data (such as products) and order progress status. This approach prevents people from creating or updating invalid or unsupported order data in inbound and outbound shipment orders. We recommend that you process these messages through a periodic batch job that the message processor triggers by using the Shipment orders message queue.
Master and reference data
Your organization must sync master data and reference data into the external system and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to ensure accurate communication. Like shipment orders, the system validates these product master data messages during processing and then automatically associates the product information with a source system record through the Source System Items entity. The external system can use business events to track changes in the message status throughout the processing life cycle.
You can designate only one source system record as the external system that's responsible for maintaining the product master data that links to the unique reference of a released product or item number. You can view and manage this data on the Source System Items page. By using data entities, you can import the master data into Supply Chain Management. To create the Release product/Item number value that you use in warehouse management, you're required to have the following master and reference data:
- Item model groups
- Item groups
- Storage dimension groups
- Tracking dimension groups
- Reservation hierarchy
- Units
- Unit sequence groups
Progress and business events
External systems often generate various business process requests for the warehouse management system. For instance, each external system might frequently check the status of a sales order. You can configure Supply Chain Management to trigger business events as needed. These events provide external systems with real-time updates on the progress and actions that are taking place in Supply Chain Management. With this setup, external systems no longer need to repeatedly poll for updates that might not have changed since the last request. Instead, they can respond only when new information is provided.