Oh Inventory, Inventory, wherefore art thou Inventory? Part 4
Using Inventory Visibility in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain, Continued
Promises, promises
The Available to Promise functionality in Inventory Visibility uses functionality called calculated measures to enable you to customize ATP to your needs. Calculated measures allow you to specify addition (expected inventory coming in) and subtraction (inventory going out) so that you can control what Inventory Visibility calculates. You also can group dimensions into an Index set. For example, you could group Warehouse and Location if for ATP you don’t need to look at the location level. Once you have updated your configuration, you can query the ATP or post updates with a change schedule. This will allow you to coordinate multiple systems and know which promises you can make and keep.
You’ve got the power (BI)
Inventory Visibility offers a Power BI dashboard which you can use as a starting point. The default KPIs include total on-hand, total available, and total ordered, as well as returned, received, and sold. From here, you can customize the various KPIs and even use Power Query to make direct edits.
An API for every season
Having all your inventory data in one place is great, but not if it’s not easily accessible. Inventory Visibility has multiple API options to both read data from external systems and allow those systems to read its data. Of course, data from D365 moves to Inventory Visibility automatically in the background, but for other systems, APIs provide the highway for your data to travel. The APIs in Inventory Visibility follow the standard process of using JSON based requests to get an OAUTH2 token and use that coupled with the type of request. Such as query the inventory or make a soft reservation. A full list of available APIs can be found here: Inventory Visibility public APIs – Supply Chain Management | Dynamics 365 | Microsoft Learn.
Paging D365, we’d like to make an update
As of D365 Supply Chain version 10.0.41, Inventory Visibility has the functionality to create update journals in D365, allowing you to send and post inventory adjustment journals. As with any batch job in D365, you can control how often it runs updates, depending on your business needs. Once transactions are posted, you can view them within Inventory Visibility.
There is also an available diagnostic tool which can ensure that what you are seeing in Inventory Visibility matches what is in D365. This tool gives you the option to immediately fix any issues or just view them so you can decide what action to take. You can also run it for all items or only WMS enabled items if you prefer.
The beginning of a beautiful inventory
Now you have what you need to get going with Inventory Visibility. You’ll be able to track all your inventory in one place, perform soft reservations against that inventory, run ATP checks, and harness the power of Power BI to see exactly what is where and how much is there. As someone famous once said, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful inventory.”
Learn more about inventory visibility in our past blogs in this series: