Inventory availability lookup

The Rank API looks for inventory availability before ranking the ship nodes.

When an order is placed by using Order Management Services, the Rank API is called for ranking ship nodes. Before ranking, the Rank API looks for inventory availability, which is provided by either Inventory Visibility or Sterling Intelligent Promising APIs.

The inventory lookup is used to identify the ship nodes that have availability of the item on the promise line. The two cases of inventory lookup are as follows:
Case 1: If you are a user of Inventory Visibility
If you are a user of Inventory Visibility, the ship nodes that have availability of item on promise line are identified internally.
Case 2: If you are an external user
If you are not a user of Inventory Visibility, you need to provide the set of ship nodes that have availability of the item on promise line by using the Define node inventory availability API.
The following table lists multiple scenarios for which Rank API looks for inventory availability and ranks the ship nodes.
Table 1. Inventory availability calculation
Scenario ignoreUnavailableNodes = Y ignoreUnavailableNodes = N
None of the nodes have availability of the item on the promise line. No ship nodes are returned to the order line. All ship nodes are returned with rejectionReason= UNAVAILABLE.
All nodes have availability of the item on the promise line. All ship nodes with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost. All ship nodes with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost.
The number of ship nodes with inventory availability is larger than the rank nodes limit. Within the rank nodes limit, ship nodes that are identified with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost.
  • Within the rank nodes limit, ship nodes that are identified with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost.
  • Ship nodes with no inventory availability are returned with rejectionReason= UNAVAILABLE.
The number of ship nodes with inventory availability is lesser than the rank nodes limit. Ship nodes that are identified with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost.
  • Ship nodes that are identified with inventory availability are ranked and returned to the order line with rank and cost.
  • Ship nodes with no inventory availability are returned with rejectionReason= UNAVAILABLE.

In both the cases, the Rank API determines a set of ship nodes that have inventory availability. The Rank API then processes the determined set of ship nodes to return 'n' number of ranked ship nodes based on rankNodesLimit. For more information about the function of Rank API, see Rank API.