Inventory Management system integration

Integrate an inventory management system with the store to ensure that inventory availability is constantly updated to reflect the store's current inventory levels. Inventory includes anything that can be physically accounted for in a fulfillment center such as items, products, SKUs, bundles, and prebuilt kits. WebSphere Commerce stores support two inventory models.

Non-ATP inventory

In the non-ATP inventory model, inventory operations are only based on existing on-hand inventory. That is, shoppers can only add items to the cart if the item is in stock. The store does not support back ordering or reserving items for future purchase. If we are integrating with an external system that does not support connecting through service APIs to retrieve real-time on hand inventory, then choose Non-ATP. We need to set a schedule to periodically retrieve inventory levels from the external system and load the data to the WebSphere Commerce database.

DOM inventory

In the DOM inventory model, WebSphere Commerce calls outbound services to allocate inventory from an external DOM inventory system. By calling outbound services, we get access to real-time on hand inventory. If your DOM inventory system supports item reservations or back orders, we can customize the store to also support reservations.

• Store interactions with a DOM inventory system
  If the store uses a DOM inventory system, the store communicates with the external system to retrieve and display the online or in-store inventory availability of an item.

• Inventory availability caching
  The inventory availability master information typically resides on one or many backend inventory management systems (IMS).

• Service interfaces used by DOM integration for inventory management
  The following service interfaces are used by DOM integration for inventory management.

• Enable DOM inventory system integration
  To integrate WebSphere Commerce with an external DOM inventory system, enable the necessary message type transports and set the store inventory configuration.