Six Benefits of Inventory Visibility

For supply chain managers in distribution and wholesale companies, inventory management is complex. The stock is often spread over multiple countries, warehouses and locations. To be successful, you need to know exactly how much stock there is. Not only in total, but also per sales channel. What is available for the online channel cannot simply be sold elsewhere. The delivery promise must be kept.

A central, uniform and real-time overview of the stock is therefore essential. This allows you to plan better, respond faster to customer requests and the overall stock accuracy is of a high level.

Microsoft Inventory Visibility is the solution to get a grip on your inventory. This independent microservice tracks real-time changes in inventory and has features such as inventory reservation, allocation, available-to-promise, and visibility into (near real-time) on-hand inventory.

This service is easily scalable and can handle millions of inventory updates every minute. Retailers and wholesalers always get an up-to-date picture of their stock position. This is how you keep your delivery promises. Below we show you how this works in practice with some concrete examples.

Inventory Visibility continuously tracks the latest inventory status: available, ordered, in transit, returned, and quarantined. This information is immediately accessible to everyone and in every application within your organization.

For example, a sales employee can immediately see the stock in his branch and in the central distribution centers. This prevents overselling and ensures that purchase and customer orders are processed smoothly.

Multi-channel Inventory Management

Inventory allocation allows you to reserve inventory for specific channels, customer groups, or locations. Once the inventory is allocated, it can only be sold through that specific online channel. For other channels, that stock is not available. This prevents stock from ending up in the wrong place.

Real-time working with “soft reservations”

"Soft reservation" allows you to allocate inventory to a sales order or channel without affecting physical inventory. This reservation is immediately deducted from the available stock. Very useful for organizations with multiple sales channels. Because even if an order has not yet been fully processed, the reserved stock is not available for sale through other channels.

Without the Inventory Visibility Service, an order must be fully completed before it is processed in inventory availability. This leads to overselling, which jeopardizes customer promise and satisfaction.

For distribution and wholesale businesses, it's not enough to just know what's in stock right now. They also want to know exactly what the future availability is, or "Available to Promise" (ATP). This must take into account future purchase orders and expected deliveries.

Inventory Visibility provides global and real-time ATP functionality. Multiple ATP calculations are possible, allowing you to determine an accurate expected delivery date per channel or scenario. The better your promise to the customer, the smaller the chance of disappointment.

Independent or Integrated

Inventory Visibility is a stand-alone microservice that can (or should!) play a central role within a wholesaler's application landscape. It is not limited to Microsoft applications. Thanks to its public APIs, you can easily integrate it with various systems such as webshops, portals, order management systems, third-party ERP systems, POS systems, and warehouse management systems.

Simplify Complexity

Inventory Visibility helps businesses accurately manage inventory and improve business processes. By making stock more visible, customer satisfaction increases, costs are saved and operational processes are improved. Your delivery times are more accurate, errors are reduced and your work is better organized.