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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ... / Can IOM run fulfillmen...
Finance | Project Operations, Human Resources, ...
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Can IOM run fulfillment optimization on a retail transaction before it's been converted to a Sales Order?

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Posted on by Nicholas Peter 73

In D365 Commerce, if you place an order to ship on the website, it will assume that all widgets will be sourced from the online channel's default warehouse. Can IOM run orchestration and/or fulfillment optimization on the cart lines before the retail transaction has been integrated back into HQ and converted into a sales order?

With distributed order management, you must have a sales order to then run through your fulfillment profile to get a fulfillment plan. This creates scenarios where a customer ordering through ecommerce and POS at the same time could buy the same widgets that show as available on both channels. Depending on which order was synchronized first and subsequently run through the DOM engine will determine which widgets get reserved to which order creating an issue with order promising and how you display 'available' inventory on your channels. 

Also, if you are auto reserving sales order lines, orders from your channels will default the storage dim (provided not marked for pickup) to that of the default on the channel. This may change post DOM depending on the results of the fulfillment plan. It may remove a reservation from one inventory dimension and create a new reservation at another, further complicating how and when you can show what is truly available for sale on your retail channels.

I am unable to determine if IOM helps address this issue with the documentation that is available online.

  • Michel van Koekenberg Profile Picture
    Michel van Koekenberg 5 on at
    RE: Can IOM run fulfillment optimization on a retail transaction before it's been converted to a Sales Order?

    Hi,

    in my opinion dynamics is not flexible enough (yet) to deal with these b2c real-time retail issues. For this we have build a stock-api handling all b2c stock near real-time and update every connected sales channel after each sale or return.

    let me know if you need more information 

    regards

    michel

  • Nicholas Peter Profile Picture
    Nicholas Peter 73 on at
    RE: Can IOM run fulfillment optimization on a retail transaction before it's been converted to a Sales Order?

    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...

  • Verified answer
    Rinitha Reddy Profile Picture
    Rinitha Reddy on at
    RE: Can IOM run fulfillment optimization on a retail transaction before it's been converted to a Sales Order?

    Hi Nicholas, thank you for your question. Unfortunately, IOM is unable to run our optimization before we get the request in as a sales order. But, I do understand the scenario you're describing and the problem that creates.

    The way I would play it back to you is that at the POS, there needs to be real-time or near real-time information on inventory so that the POS doesn't accept orders that cannot be fulfilled. Let me know if my understanding is incorrect.

    I will discuss this with my team and come back with our approach/ recommendation.

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