Hi Rinitha, thank you for your response.
With IOM relying on a sales order I anticipate the same limitations we have with DOM. This could be an area of improvement if the product team is looking for feedback on this service. If there was a way to incorporate retail transactions before they have been integrated back to HQ and in most scenarios synchronized to sales orders, this would be a large improvement addressing a gap in the distributed order management solution.
Here is an example
IOM relies on Inventory as a service as it's source of 'the' inventory snapshot. D365 Commerce (online, call center, POS) does not integrate to the inventory as a service out of the box so our first hurdle is having to write an extension to use IVS in place of the native inventory APIs on the CSU.
In this scenario I have 1 retail channel, 1 online channel, and 1 call center channel. The retail channel and the online channel use their own respective CSUs.
3 customers want to purchase item #1 and I have 10 available physical inventory of item #1.
Customer 1 is in store and wants to buy 5 of item 1. POS shows there are 10 available bc we wrote an extension to leverage IVS to display available inventory on POS. The sales clerks sells the 5 qty of item 1. This transaction will write to the channel database and the CSU would know that bc we sold 5 of the 10, only 5 widgets should show as available, but we wrote an extension to no longer leverage the getavailableinventoryAPI, we are now using the IVS as our inventory snapshot. We don't have an out of the box way to tell IVS, I just sold 5 of these, only show 5 as available and I am not sure if it's even supported.
While customer 1 was checking out, customer 2 is looking online and adds item 1 to their cart. IVS says there are 10 available physical (we also wrote a mod here to leverage IVS over the CSU inventory API) so they also purchase the 10 widgets.
A few minutes later, customer 3 now calls call center and says, hey I would like to purchase item 1, how much inventory do you have? The sales from the retail channels above have not come back to HQ so the call center clerk tells the customer, I have 10 available, would you like 10? The customer agrees and we sell the customer 10 of item #1. We decided to configure auto reservation on sales orders so at the time of call center order entry and post 'complete order', the 10 available widgets are no longer available which would update IVS, thus updating the available inventory on the retail channel's POS and the online channel's website.
I had 10 widgets of item #1 and in this scenario, we sold 25. We said the inventory was available for sale bc the IVS said it was still available.
Now we have a few issues that span customer satisfaction, order promising, backorder management, logistics, procurement, etc...
