Available to promise (ATP) inventory allocation

ATP inventory consists of on-hand inventory minus reserved inventory and inventory allocated for backorders. ATP inventory is the inventory that is available to fulfill orders.

The ATP support enables you to allocate stock from existing inventory or backorder from expected inventory. We can also obtain an estimated availability time for each order item once it has been added into the shopping cart. The ATP also supports allocating stocks for future order processing.

The WebSphere Commerce system uses a configuration flag to determine which set of interfaces to use. The ALLOCATIONGOODFOR column in the STORE database, which was previously used to distinguish ATP from non-ATP inventory and to define the expiration time of the inventory allocation, has now only the latter use. The INVENTORYSYSTEM column in the STORE database has values -1, -2 or -3 depending on whether the store is using ATP, non-ATP or no-inventory.

The following commands are ATP task commands for WebSphere Commerce:

Note: ManageInventoryCmd and DoInventoryActionCmd are quite different from other commands in that they act as a facade to others. Customers can select these two commands as their own inventory integration points.

The WebSphere Commerce order management subsystem is compatible with earlier versions, and one can continue to use the GetEligibleFulfillmentCentersCmd and AllocateInventoryCmd task commands used in the previous product releases to interface with our own inventory system.


Related concepts
Inventory allocation
Order Management subsystem
Quantity units


Related tasks
Enable a store to use available-to-promise (ATP) inventory


Related reference
Order Management subsystem URLs
ReturnItemAdd URL