Generic InventoryLevel business object
The generic InventoryLevel business object is used to capture an item's stock
quantities for a particular Inventory Type and Stock Type. An Inventory Type
represents a category of inventory. Such categories allow an organization to
represent inventory that is managed separately due to ownership or physical
location. For example, a company might use the following Inventory Types:
- On-Hand Inventory, which represents inventory that is physically located
at the company and is owned by the company.
- Consignment Inventory, which represents inventory that is not physically
located at the company but is owned by the company.
- Vendor Inventory, which represents inventory that is physically located
at the company but is not owned by the company A Stock Type represents the
state of the inventory.
Examples of Stock Types are "Unrestricted", "Quality Inspection", "Blocked
Stock", and "In-Transit".
Each Inventory Type/Stock Type combination is represented by a single instance
of the generic InventoryLevel business object. For example, assume that a company
sells a product called "Widget." Currently, the company has 200 Widgets in on-hand
inventory and 30 widgets in Consignment inventory at Customer A. Fifty of the
on-hand Widgets are of In-Transit Stock Type. One hundred fifty are of Unrestricted
Stock Type. All of the Consignment inventory is of Unrestricted Stock Type.
IBM represents this information as the following three separate InventoryLevel
business objects:
- 50 Widgets of Inventory Type On-Hand, In-Transit
- 150 Widgets of Inventory Type On-Hand, Unrestricted
- 30 Widgets of Inventory Type Customer Consignment, Unrestricted
Issues and assumptions
- InventoryLevel is used to synchronize data between the following types
of source and destination applications:
- The source application has been designated as the master or owner of
the inventory level information.
- The destination application has a transaction (such as cycle count or
physical adjustments) or mechanism (such as direct table update) that
effectively revises the inventory quantity for an item at an inventory
location level.
- InventoryLevel does not contain cost information for its associated item.
IBM assumes that the value of the item is managed independently of the inventory-level adjustment process. Item cost information is contained in the generic
ItemBasic business object.
- The unit of measure of inventory level is the same between the collaborative
systems.
- InventoryLevel does not contain any information that might have financial,
valuation, or accounting implications.
- InventoryLevel does not contain any Available to Promise (ATP) quantities,
because this data can be based on several factors. These factors include reservations,
purchase orders, and outstanding sales orders.
- InventoryLevel does not contain any item revision data.
Business object structure
InventoryLevel is a hierarchical business object that contains the information
necessary to reflect revised inventory levels between a source and destination
application. It contains such information as:
- The latest adjusted quantity for an item in inventory.
- The identifiers of the associated item, customer, and vendor.
- The identifier of the organization to which the item belongs.
- The identifier of the physical location where the item is stocked.
- The Inventory Type and Stock Type.
- The unit of measurement.
- The processing date on which the change is made.
InventoryLevel contains the InventorySerialNumber child business object, with
cardinality of n. InventorySerialNumber allows each inventoried item to contain
multiple serial numbers.
Supported verbs
The generic InventoryLevel business object supports the following verbs:
- Request Processing (sending to the destination application): Create, Update,
Delete, and RetrieveByContent
- Event Notification (receiving from the source application): Create
Examining the object
To examine the attributes of the generic InventoryLevel business object, use
System Manager or Process Designer Express.
Related Reference
