Inventory allocation for the Inventory Visibility Add-in
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new or changed in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
| Enabled for | Public preview | General availability |
|---|---|---|
| Users by admins, makers, or analysts | 
May 23, 2022 |
Jul 25, 2022 |
Business value
Businesses constantly experience fluctuating inventory levels, especially when running a sales promotion or experiencing supply shortages. Inventory allocation lets you preallocate available inventory to make sure you can fulfill orders for key channels or accounts. It helps you meet service level agreements (SLAs) and fulfill commitments to important customers. With global visibility over your inventory allocations, you can align your multichannel inventory control strategy across legal entities.
Feature details
Inventory allocation allows you to set aside dedicated inventory to make sure you can fulfill your most profitable channels or customers. Without inventory allocation, inventory is most typically fulfilled using a simple first come, first served principle. Inventory Visibility gives you more control by allowing you to build virtual inventory pools that are created based on allocation rules and allocation objects. Allocation objects are dimensions you can use to subgroup available inventory within a physical inventory location.
You can use virtual inventory pools for preallocating (ringfencing) a portion of inventory for your most profitable channels or customers. Front-end systems can submit queries to Inventory Visibility and can make soft reservations that respect the allocation objects dimensions. Inventory Visibility then finds the applicable allocation rule and responds with the available allocated inventory.
With the inventory allocation feature you can:
- Set up inventory allocation receiver objects, which can be based on channels, locations, customer groups or customized dimension. You can also create a hierarchical structure of allocation receivers.
- Restrict the actual consumption to allocated quantities. You can opt in for a hard check where if the allocated quantities are all consumed, new demand requests posted by the same allocation receiver object will be rejected.
- Set up a fallback shared inventory pool. Inventory in the common pool is allocated for all channels and customers based on a first come, first served principle. If a dedicated virtual pool is out of stock, you can use the common pool to fulfill an order.