Oh Inventory, Inventory, wherefore art thou Inventory? Part 2

Install and set up of Inventory Visibility in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain

So, you’ve decided that having visibility of all your inventory in one central location sounds like a deal that you just can’t pass up.  Before you get to slicing and dicing that data, you’ll need to install and configure the add-in.  This blog part covers the high-level points of getting that done, but if you need more detailed steps, check out Install the Inventory Visibility Add-in – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn

Insert the floppy disk into the A: drive

The first part of the installation involves heading over the Microsoft Entra and registering an application and creating a client secret.  Make sure you take note of the Application ID and Tenant ID values as you need to use them later.  Once this is complete, there are two ways to get the microservice up and running.  We’ll talk about using Lifecycle Services here, but it’s also possible to do this part using Power Platform.  Once you are in LCS, find the environment where you want to install the add-in.  Note that you can only install the add-in on a Tier 2 (Sandbox) or higher machine: it won’t be available to install on a cloud-hosted development VM.  Go into the full details of your chosen environment, and in the Environment add-ins section, install a new add-in and choose Inventory Visibility.  It’s going to prompt you to enter the Application ID and Tenant ID that you wrote down before.

After you click install, you can go grab a cup of coffee, have a snack, take a nice tropical vacation, and when you get back the installation should be complete.  You can verify by going to make.powerapps.com for your chosen environment and you should see Inventory Visibility under Apps.

Setting the stage for inventory visibility

The next part of the process is in D365.  You will want to go to the feature management workspace and make sure all the inventory visibility features are enabled.

You’ll also need to go to Inventory Management > Inventory Visibility > Inventory Visibility Integration parameters.  In the general section, you’ll want to click the Get Endpoint button to have the system set your endpoint and then set the maximum number of records to 512 if it isn’t already.  Your final task will be to go to Inventory Management > Periodic tasks > Inventory Visibility Integration and enable the job.

Getting to the good stuff

Part three of this blog will cover using the tools in Inventory Visibility to search for products, check on-hand, and work with reservations.  Future parts of this blog series will touch on some of the other tools available, such as ATP.