Global Inventory Visibility

You can use Global Inventory Visibility for acquiring and monitoring inventory levels so that the product is available for shipment when your customer wants it.

Global Inventory Visibility is a solution that provides a consolidated view of inventory, helping coordinate your global inventory across multiple sites, enterprises and participants, allowing managers to track inventory anywhere at both internal and external ship nodes. Sterling™ Order Management System gives you a synchronized real-time availability view of virtually all supply and demand from multiple systems, including in store, in DC, at distributors, at suppliers, and in transit. Global Inventory Visibility uses an intelligent sourcing engine that optimizes inventory use across the extended enterprise to provide the best Available-to-promise (ATP) dates and the most efficient fulfillment options available. It also identifies shortages and allows inventory planners to resolve problems by manipulating inventory balances, through allocation of sales orders, and execution of purchases or movement of inventory. Data can be shared with external systems, customers, suppliers, and partners for demand and supply management.

Next-generation platform IBM® Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility is available by default. In most cases, new implementations use IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility instead of Global Inventory Visibility. For more information, see IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility.

Matching supply to demand

Sterling Order Management System enables you to configure how you match the supply of an item to the demand. The matching process can use various criteria, which can be configurable, such as ETA dates, supply and demand considerations, and others.

Reservations

In Sterling Order Management System, demand is composed of different types of specific entities called “demands.” One type of demand is a reservation. How do you guarantee a customer that inventory has been put aside for them? One way is to create a reservation on the system, which the customer must confirm or cancel. A reservation is a quantity of an item that the seller puts aside for a customer who has the intent to purchase the items later. This takes number of inventories out of available inventory to cater to a customer's specific demand. A reservation can be upgraded to an order or it can be canceled.

Segmentation

In Sterling Order Management System, supply is composed of different types of specific entities. A type of "supply" is inventory segmentation. How do you guarantee a customer that inventory has been put aside for them? Inventory segmentation is the apportion of inventory into segments. An inventory segment is a certain amount of inventory set aside to cater to the demand from a group of privileged customers. This inventory is what is required to fulfill commitments and contracts. When inventory is apportioned for a segment, it indicates that the inventory is not to be consumed for demands other than the demands with matching segments, segment types, or both.

Inventory availability monitoring

E-commerce businesses often need real-time inventory availability indicators so that they can provide snapshots of the inventory picture to their customers without constantly making calls to Sterling Order Management System. This can be helpful on websites where orders are placed, and the inventory is being viewed and modified all the time. Examples of inventory availability indicators are In Stock, Low, Limited, and Backorder/Pre-order, and Out of Stock. The criteria for each indicator level can be defined in the Applications Manager.

Sterling Order Management System provides this functions through the real-time inventory availability monitor. There are three ways in which it can run:

Activity-based mode: In this mode, Sterling Order Management System triggers items in real time, when a threshold is crossed.

Quick sync mode: Resends the most recently published inventory availability information.

Full sync mode: Monitors all of the items regardless of activity and publishes the inventory information for all of the items.

Inventory consolidation

The Hub organization specifies the rule to determine how inventory items are identified and consolidated. The Hub can choose to consolidate at either the Hub level or the Enterprise level. When inventory is consolidated at the Hub level, the item ID and unit of measure is assumed to be unique across all organizations and there is no inventory segmentation. Selecting an Enterprise-level consolidation implies inventory is segmented by each enterprise.