Oh Inventory, Inventory, wherefore art thou Inventory? Part 3

Using Inventory Visibility in D365 Supply Chain

You have Inventory Visibility installed and configured.  Now it’s time to dive in and see what this app can do for you.  In case you missed any of the installation or configuration steps, you can catch up by checking out Install the Inventory Visibility Add-in – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn or checking out part 1 and part 2 of this blog series

Charting a Course to Inventory Visibility in D365 Supply Chain

The first powerful tool is the Inventory Summary.  This allows you to look at a cross-section of all your inventory from multiple data sources.  You can select which data sources you want to focus on and get results that you can sort by dimension, like color or site.  You also have control over which aspects of the data you want to see, so for example you want to check what items have been reserved, you can show those columns and not the others.  There is also a Power BI option which gives you a way to see your inventory via charts or graphs.

Getting real with your inventory

Inventory Visibility also gives you a real-time query function.  You can choose which dimensions will be a part of the query, and the query can even be called from an external source via the included public API.  The results of the query show things like on-hand and reserved, but also for the built-in capabilities of ATP and soft reservation.

Soft Reservations are Recommended

Perhaps you have an external app you use to place certain types of orders, but the inventory is all in D365.  You need to be able to quickly to determine if you have inventory to allocate to orders via this external app.  Inventory Visibility can help here with soft reservation functionality.  The external app can use RESTful API calls to check the available to reserve quantity and then place a soft reservation so that Inventory Visibility can show exactly what inventory is available.  You can even customize the exact formula for checking the available to reserve so that you get exactly what you need.  Changes in D365 can also be reflected in Inventory Visibility in terms of soft reservation, so that all your systems are on the same page.

To Boldly Go Where no Inventory has Gone Before

The final part in this blog series will cover using ATP with Inventory Visibility, the sample PowerBI dashboard, and a deeper look into the API options.  There are also diagnostic tools to make sure everything stays synched up nicely.