Integrating with Inventory service

As a System Integrator, you must thoroughly plan your project and engage your implementation partner or for assistance with your implementation for Inventory service.

  • If you are an existing Sterling Order Management customer, you can integrate Sterling Order Management-Global Inventory Visibility with Inventory service in Sterling Intelligent Promising. For more information, see Integrating inventory service with Sterling Order Management.
    It is recommended that you use Inventory service in Sterling Intelligent Promising because it offers high availability and real-time inventory accuracy. For the external inventory data, the accuracy of the fulfillment estimate relies heavily on the throughput and efficiency of the supplier system.
  • If you want to propagate inventory data from other external systems to Sterling Intelligent Promising, see Integrating inventory data from external systems to Inventory service.
Note: You must avoid the combination of the external inventory data and Inventory service due to the high data contention risk if both track the same product catalog.

Sterling Intelligent Promising provides in-built integration between its inventory service and Promising services and Inventory Visibility and Optimization service. When the inventory service service detects a net change in inventory availability, the inventory picture propagates to the Promising Service and the Optimization service in real time.

For example, consider that Node01 has an available quantity of 100 for SKU01. An inventory reservation with an expiry of 15 minutes was placed for SKU01 for a quantity of 20. This table shows the chronological sequence of events that occurs as a result of the inventory reservation.
Table 1. Chronological sequence of events as per the inventory reservation
Transaction sequence number and timing Transaction description
T0 SKU01 has 100 quantity
T1 Reservation of 15 minutes is applied for 20 quantity of SKU01.
T2 An availability change is detected and an adjustment is made from 100 to 80 quantity (a net of minus 20 quantity).
T3 The inventory change (delta) data is propagated to the Promising Service and the Optimization Service.
T4 A shopper requests a fulfillment estimate for SKU01 and sees that a quantity of 80 are in stock.
T1 plus 15 minutes After 15 minutes, the reserved quantity returns to the inventory availability pool. The availability for SKU01 is updated from 80 to 100 quantity.
T2 plus 15 minutes The inventory change (delta) data is propagated to the Promising Service and the Optimization Service.
T3 plus 15 minutes A shopper requests a fulfillment estimate for SKU01 and sees that a quantity of 100 are in stock.
Important: The Inventory service APIs in Sterling Intelligent Promising are not meant for running push mechanisms to other systems in real time and can be used for occasional pushes to marketplaces that does not call Sterling Intelligent Promising APIs directly that can be used for accounting and auditing purposes also.

To get real time item availability, ensure that the system that pushes supply or demand change updates to an inventory system also updates inventory service in Sterling Intelligent Promising.