Handling inventory reservation

Reservation refers to the quantity of an item that is placed on hold to cater to a specific demand.

You can reserve items that are less in stock to fulfill an order pertaining to high priority customers or for first come first served basis.

Creating reservations

It is recommended that you create reservations only in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility by using the Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility Reservation REST API. Alternatively, you can use the Sterling Order Management System reserveAvailableInventory API to create reservations. For more information about the Sterling Order Management System reserveAvailableInventory API, see Javadoc.

Note:

For a new customer implementation, the reserveAvailableInventory API call by default creates reservations in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility with OPEN_ORDER demand type. Therefore, in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility reservations affect inventory that are available to sell.
For a migrated customer implementation, the reserveAvailableInventory API call by default creates reservations in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility with Scheduled demand type to match the behavior of Global Inventory Visibility. Therefore, in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility reservations affect inventory that are available to schedule.

For more information about reservations, see Reservations.

Inventory is not locked for Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility integration. When the Sterling Order Management System reserveAvailableInventory API is called, the Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility Reservations API is internally called to make reservations at specific nodes after optimization. After determining the best solution based on real-time availability, reservation might not succeed as the inventory might be consumed by some other transaction. An appropriate message is displayed in the output and inventory is not reserved.

Consuming reservations

During order creation, reservations can be consumed by passing the reservation details as input to the OrderLineReservation element of the createOrder API. For more information about the createOrder API, see Javadoc.

Note:

For any new customer implementation, it is recommended that you create a custom demand type with committed level as non-committed with the same name in both Sterling Order Management System and Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility. While consuming the reservations, pass the same in the OrderLineReservation element of createOrder and changeOrder. For example, if you create a custom non-committed demand type for RSRV_OPEN_ORDER.ex in Sterling Order Management System, ensure to create an extended demand type with the same name, which is RSRV_OPEN_ORDER.ex in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility. This is derived from the non-committed demand type, for example OPEN_ORDER. For more information about creating a custom demand type, see IBM Inventory Visibility APIs.
For any customer implementation who migrate from phase 1 to phase 2, after migration while consuming reservations, a backward compatible mechanism is in effect. This takes care of consuming the matching pre-migration reservations that are present in Sterling Order Management System first, followed by consuming the reservations present in Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility. When a pre-migration reservation is consumed, a corresponding negative demand is sent to Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility for the consumed quantity to balance the existing demand that is associated with the reservation. After sufficient time has elapsed, you can optionally turn off this mechanism to prevent unnecessary lookup of pre-migration reservations. For this, set the migration.complete property in the iv_integration category. For example, if the pre-migration reservation expiration time is set for two hours, post migration after two hours is elapsed, you can turn off the mechanism as there are no more valid pre-migration reservations in Sterling Order Management System.
For any customer implementation who migrate from phase1 to phase2, after migration when the pre-migration reservations present in Sterling Order Management System are purged by using the Reservation or Inventory purge agent, the corresponding negative demand is sent to Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility so that the reservation quantity can balance the existing demand associated with the reservation.