Inventory availability monitoring

E-commerce businesses often need real-time inventory availability indicators so that they can provide to their customers snapshots of the inventory picture without constantly making calls to Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation. This can be very helpful on web sites where orders are placed, and the inventory is being viewed and modified all the time. Examples of inventory availability indicators are In Stock, Low, Limited, and Backorder/Pre-order, and Out of Stock. The criteria for each indicator level can be defined in the Applications Manager.

Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation provides this functionality through the real-time inventory availability monitor. There are three ways in which it can run:

Activity based mode

In this mode, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation keeps track of inventory changes in real time. If the inventory level of a given item goes above or below a threshold defined in the monitoring rule of the Applications Manager, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation publishes the updated inventory level to external systems.

Quick sync mode

When running in this mode, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation sends the most recent inventory availability information recorded by the monitor out to external systems. If an item's inventory level went from In-Stock to Low and then back to In-Stock, Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation only publishes the 'In-Stock' level for that item at synchronization time.

Additionally, since inventory availability information includes on-hand and future availability, this mode can be used to send availability messages to the planning and promotion systems.

Full sync mode

Typically, an enterprise runs this as a scheduled job, generally at night time. Inventory availability information is sent for all items, regardless of whether or not they have been through availability changes.

The Full Sync mode is expected to be used the first time the inventory availability monitor is run, if inventory information has not been loaded into Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation through the Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation APIs or Services.

Note: Even when running in activity-based mode, the inventory availability monitor does not completely operate in real-time. Inventory changes need to be published to a database table, which needs to be processed by the monitor. You should therefore think of it as near real-time.