Supply and demand
The supply for an item is the entire quantity of the item that is received at a node. The demand for an item is the expressed desire to use a quantity of the item. Demand includes orders that are placed and reservations that are made for an item.
- Supply includes the on-hand supply. Supply consists of purchase orders (POs) and advance shipment notices (ASNs) that are received by the node. In addition to on-hand supply, supply includes future inventory like purchase order that were previously place or have not arrived from vendors.
- Demand can be fulfilled only if sufficient supply exists. The quantity available is the amount of supply that is remaining after all demands for the item is fulfilled. Therefore, the available inventory is the difference between its supply and demand.
The Inventory service provides the real-time availability picture by synchronizing multiple demand types such as schedules, plans, quotes, orders, with supply types such as on-hand, inbound, on purchase, and scheduled. For more information about what the Supply Type REST API considers to be on-hand, see the REST API documentation.
To maintain a balance between processing time and volume update for bulk supply or demand requests such as supply sync request, attempt to keep the number of API actions (item-node) lines to approximately 100 per request. For more information, see batch processing request details in Supply sync transparency and Sync Supply API request.