Inventory Visibility reservations
Inventory Visibility includes a reservation feature that allows you to reserve items or materials for certain purposes, channels, or customers. You can create soft reservations, offset them on physical consumption, and adjust or unreserve specified inventory quantities. However, before you can use this feature, you'll need to learn how to set up the feature in the Inventory Visibility app and Supply Chain Management.
Soft reservations
Soft reservations help organizations more accurately understand their available inventory. For example, consider a scenario where your company has two or more different systems that handle outbound orders. The organization is strict about inventory and wants to avoid situations where product inventory is double-booked.
With soft reservations, your initial inventory level is synced to Inventory Visibility. As soft reservations are posted from your various order channels, Inventory Visibility will attempt to make a soft reservation. If the attempt succeeds, Inventory Visibility will add to the soft-reserved quantity, deduct from the available for reservation quantity, and then provide a soft reservation ID.
You can sync these soft-reserved orders into Supply Chain Management to make hard reservations, which would release the order to the warehouse and/or update the final inventory quantity. Furthermore, you can set up the system to offset your soft reservations when physical inventory is updated in Supply Chain Management.
Turn on reservations in Inventory Visibility
To turn on the reservation feature in Inventory Visibility, go to the Configuration page and then select the Feature Management tab. Ensure that the OnHandReservation feature is turned on. If not, turn on the feature and then select Update Configuration in the upper-right corner.
To turn on reservations in Supply Chain Management, go to the Feature management workspace and ensure that the Inventory Visibility integration with reservation offset feature is enabled. Then, go to Inventory Management > Setup > Inventory Visibility integration parameters and open the Reservation offset tab. Ensure that the Enable reservation offset field is set to Yes. For the Reservation offset modifier, you'll have a few different options based on your company's business needs.
For more information, see Inventory Visibility reservations.
Use the reservation feature in Inventory Visibility
Your external systems can call the reservation API, which causes the system to mark the reservation of the goods and quantities that are specified in the API call. For instance, if a sales order is made through your company's e-commerce website, the dimensions from the order would be passed to Inventory Visibility through an API call. Then, Inventory Visibility makes a reservation by using the dimensions that it received from the order.
If you want to offset a soft-reserved quantity after the quantity on an order is physically deducted in Supply Chain Management, an out-of-the-box integration between Inventory Visibility and Supply Chain Management is available.
If you sign in to Supply Chain Management, go to Sales and marketing > Sales Orders > All Sales Orders. Select New in the Action Pane, and then re-create the external sales order and add a sales line with the exact same values. On the Sales order lines FastTab, select the previously entered sales line and then select Inventory > Reservation ID on the toolbar. You can copy the soft reservation ID that you received from your soft reservation request response and then paste it into the Reservation ID field.
Alternatively, you can leave the field blank and select the Inventory service auto offset checkbox. After selecting OK, you can confirm the reservation status by selecting Inventory > Reservation on the toolbar of the Sales order lines FastTab. A batch job will run every minute to sync offset requests from Supply Chain Management to Inventory Visibility.