The Inventory Visibility Add-on for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is a stand-alone microservice that is highly scalable, enabling high-volume retailers and manufacturers to manage millions of inventory updates every minute and get real-time visibility of inventory positions between channels.
Get a global view of inventory
The integrated solution allows you to define your own data sources and centralize inventory data.
There are two approaches to viewing your inventory:
- Submit a query through the high-performance API. This API can return near real-time inventory data directly from a cached instance.
- See the raw list available. This list is periodically synced from a cached instance and is viewable in the Dataverse.
Flexible reservations
Soft booking applies when a business must reserve a specific number of products to support, for example, sales order fulfillment that prevents overselling. When a sales order is created and confirmed in Supply Chain Management or other order management systems, a request to reserve the quantity is sent to Inventory Visibility. Inventory visibility allows you to reserve products that have specific dimension details and inventory transaction types. Once the quantity has been successfully reserved, a reservation ID is returned. You can use this reservation ID to link to the original order in Supply Chain Management or other order management systems.
The functionality is designed so that a reservation in Inventory Visibility does not change the total quantity. Instead, just mark the amount reserved. (For this reason, it is called booking flexible). The soft reserved quantity can be offset when products are consumed in Supply Chain Management or a third party system by calling the API again to perform a quantity deduction and update the total quantity in Inventory Visibility.
How to install the Inventory Visibility plugin
Before you install the plugin, register an app and add a private client to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) in your Azure subscription. Be sure to note the ID values of application (client), private client and ID of tenant, as you will need them later.
After registering an application and adding a client secret to Azure AD, follow these steps to install the inventory visibility plugin.
- Login to LCS.
- On the main page, select the project where the environment is deployed.
- On the project page, select the environment in which you want to install the plugin.
- On the environment page, scroll down until you find the section complements of environment in the section integration of PowerPlatform. There, you can find the name of the Dataverse environment. Confirm that the Dataverse environment name is the one you want to use for inventory visibility.
- In the section complements of environment, select Install a new plugin.
- Select the link Install a new plugin. A list of plugins will appear
- From the list, select inventory visibility.
- Set the following fields for your environment:
- Application identifier (client) AAD - Enter the Azure AD Application ID that you created and made a note of.
- ID of tenant from AAD: Enter the Tenant ID you took note of
- Accept the terms and conditions by selecting the checkbox Terms and Conditions.
- Select Install. The status of the plugin is displayed as Facility. When the installation is complete, refresh the page. The state should change to installed.
- In Dataverse, select the section Applications in the left navigation pane and check that Inventory Visibility Power Apps has been installed successfully.
Next steps
If you are interested in learning more about the inventory visibility plugin at Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Supply Chain Management, Contact us.
