Inventory assets

Inventory includes anything that can be physically accounted for in a fulfillment center. There are specific definitions of types of inventory that can be fulfilled, such as items, products, SKUs, bundles, and packages; but these are all considered inventory. Products are configured for fulfillment in the Product wizard and the Product notebook. This includes options to track inventory, allow backorder, force backorder, release separately, and specify that the product should not be returned. The WebSphere Commerce Accelerator distinguishes between two major types of inventory that can be received:

Expected inventory is received from a vendor and typically paid for with a purchase order. The WebSphere Commerce Accelerator tracks expected inventory with expected inventory records, and allows you to record an external identifier, typically a purchase order number from an external system. In this way, you can keep track of the inventory you have ordered, as well as what has and has not arrived. Expected inventory details are the specifics about products in an expected inventory record, such as the fulfillment center expecting the product, the expected receipt date, quantity expected, and comments.

An expected inventory record cannot be deleted once inventory has been received against it, and expected inventory details cannot be changed or deleted once any part of that inventory has been received.

When orders are placed for inventory that is available in a fulfillment center, the order system allocates inventory to those orders. Allocating inventory to an order makes it unavailable to the order system. If the order is canceled, the inventory becomes available again. If an order is placed for inventory that is not available, a backorder can be created. If there is expected inventory that could be used to fulfill the backorder, then the expected inventory is allocated to the backorder and the customer can be provided with an expected ship date.

For all store models, the inventory configuration (how inventory and backorders are managed) is governed by the value of the FFMCENTER.INVENTORYOPFLAGS field. If FFMCENTER.INVENTORYOPFLAGS is set to 0 for a given store, backorders will be enabled for that store. You must also create and administer the WebSphere Commerce INVENTORY records for that store; otherwise every order will be a backorder.

Ad hoc inventory receipts are created when inventory arrives at a fulfillment center without a corresponding expected inventory record. This could be due to an unexpected inventory arrival, or it could be the choice of the merchant or seller not to use expected inventory records to record inventory receipts. Products must exist in the WebSphere Commerce system in order to be received, whether the inventory receipt is expected or ad hoc.

To understand inventory assets, it is necessary to understand the relationships between inventory and the store. This can be explained by the use of an information model. A store may use Available-to-promise (ATP), non-ATP or No inventory methods. 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, will now be used only to define the expired time (in seconds) after an order is allocated. A new column INVENTORYSYSTEM is added to the STORE database having values -1 (for ATP Inventory), -2 (for non-ATP Inventory) and -3 (for No-Inventory).

The default configuration for the Extended Sites store model is to disable backorders.

Related concepts

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