1. Business Use Case Examples

After a reseller purchases Products from a brand, they must immediately update the Inventory of the reseller’s assigned Warehouse. When submitting a Sales Order, you can enforce a rule that prevents submission if Inventory is insufficient. Once a Sales Order is submitted successfully, the system increases the corresponding Warehouse’s reserved Inventory to ensure order accuracy and validity. When creating a Shipping Order, you can select a Warehouse for fulfillment, and the system deducts the actual Inventory from that Warehouse.

Insufficient Inventory or excessively high Inventory is one of the biggest challenges resellers face. Reasonable Inventory control helps channel managers efficiently monitor product stock, keep Inventory within acceptable levels, ensure orderly operations, and avoid the high carrying costs of overstock or lost sales caused by stockouts.

2. Detailed Description of Channel Inventory

2.1 Inbound and Outbound for Channel Inventory

• You can only create Channel Inventory by creating an Inbound Order for the channel; you cannot create Channel Inventory records directly.
• Changes to Channel Inventory quantities occur through confirmation of channel business documents. After confirmation, the system automatically creates Channel Inbound Orders or Channel Outbound Orders to update Inventory. You cannot edit Channel Inventory quantities directly.

2.2 Safety Stock

• You can set a product’s Safety Stock value on the Products record.
• In Order Settings you can configure how Inventory is displayed. If you choose a fuzzy display, and Safety Stock is set, Inventory will be shown in three fuzzy states:
  • Out of stock: Available Inventory <= 0
  • Low: 0 < Available Inventory < Safety Stock
  • Sufficient: Available Inventory >= Safety Stock
• If Safety Stock is not set, the fuzzy display shows two states:
  • Out of stock: Available Inventory <= 0
  • Sufficient: Available Inventory > 0

Summary of fuzzy states when Safety Stock is set: - Out of stock: Available Inventory <= 0 - Low: 0 < Available Inventory < Safety Stock - Sufficient: Available Inventory >= Safety Stock

Summary of fuzzy states when Safety Stock is not set: - Out of stock: Available Inventory <= 0 - Sufficient: Available Inventory > 0

2.3 Scope of Channel Inventory

• Channel Inventory is reserved for channel operations only. Brand-side operations typically use Inventory associated with predefined Record Types; the two cannot be mixed.
• For example, when creating a channel Sales Order you can only select a channel Warehouse and validate against that Warehouse’s Inventory. When creating a Sales Order for a predefined or custom Record Type, you can only select Warehouses tied to that Record Type and validate against that Record Type’s Inventory.