Inventory Module Overview

Inventory Module Overview

A diagram of the main layers of the Fluent platform, 'Fluent Order Management' is shown below. As you can see, Inventory is one of the core Modules of the Fluent platform providing capabilities relevant to the Inventory domain:

Inventory module reference features and capabilities:

• Create and update Standard and Variant products
• Category management
  • Create and update Categories for standard and variant products e.g. Men's Shoes
  • Create and update Sub-Categories for standard and variant products. e.g. Men's Formal Shoes
• Category and Product Upsert (Note: Product Upsert is not currently enabled in Training accounts).  The status of category/product (ACTIVE or INACTIVE) determines whether the inventory at this category/product level can be used (or not) for order fulfilment purposes.
• Fulfilment reservation, confirmation and cancellation.
• Inventory Batch Process - updates of absolute inventory last on hand (LOH) value, providing the latest values of inventory that a company has in their locations — host systems usually include an ERP/POS/WMS
• Inventory Delta Process - inventory updates used to preform relative updates (incremental or decremental) against an inventory position. These are often used to notify the OMS of offline stock movements that have occurred during the day. 
• Manage inventory available to sell (ATS) via Virtual Catalogues e.g. HD VC for Home Delivery Network
• Control Groups and Controls management allows configuration of safety stock buffers and exclusions

Extension of Inventory Module's capabilities is possible through Software Development Kits (SDKs)

Common capability extensions:

• Soft Reservation refers to the temporary booking of an item to hold stock for a particular amount of time.  Here, external systems query the inventory position of requested items, return an accurate count of available inventory, and temporarily reserve the requested items. 
• Back-order is the process of selling inventory that is not in stock. This capability provides customers with an option to purchase your products even when you don’t have enough in stock by creating back-ordered items.
• Inventory segmentation is a capability that allows retailers to set aside a certain amount of inventory to cater to the needs of different channels or groups. This ensures that each channel has sufficient inventory to satisfy demand.

Benefits to retailers:

• Flexibility to use reference functionality and 'extend' capabilities when required leads to a reduction in implementation and maintenance costs.
• Provide accurate Available-to-sell (ATS) and Available-to-promise (ATP) inventory stock levels to reduce overselling and underselling of the products.
• Gain a unified view of inventory across all locations and maintain 'single source of the truth' across all inventory management systems
• Provide greater flexibility to retailers: 
  • Exclude products or categories from a virtual catalogue.
  • Optimise safety stock by product, Category, Location.
• Segment inventory to ensure that each channel has sufficient inventory to satisfy demand
• Expand what's Available to sell (ATS):
  • Add or remove locations to and from networks.
  • Deactivate or activate the product or location to exclude or include what's available to sell.

How it works

Review the table below of key concepts which will help you better understand how the Inventory module works:

A diagram of the reference module process is shown below:

• The Last on Hand or Delta quantity for an inventory position is sent from the ERP / POS / WMS systems to the 'Inventory Catalogue Workflow'.
• Inventory Catalogue Workflow updates the inventory position in the Inventory Catalogue.
• The Inventory Position notifies the Virtual Catalogue Workflow which loads up any relevant Controls (safety stock buffers and exclusions) from the Control Group before updating the corresponding virtual position in the Virtual Catalogue.   Virtual inventory positions provide sales channels (e.g. an eCommerce Site) with an accurate picture of ATS inventory, preventing overselling or underselling.
• Any product status updates from ERP/ PIM systems are communicated back to the Inventory Catalogue Workflow, e.g. for a particular product that's no longer part of the sellable catalogue the status of the inventory position can be changed from an ACTIVE product to INACTIVE.
• Inventory updates relating to processing of orders are sent into the Inventory Catalogue Workflow from the 'Order Management Workflows', e.g. inventory reservations, converting a reservation to a sale, or cancelling the inventory reservation.