Inventory Availability Lookup Process during Customer Order Creation
Scenario 13 illustrates the process in which an Online Order Capture System (OOC) or Order Management System (OMS) determine inventory availability during customer order creation.
RMS Inventory tables are replicated from the main RMS schema to the Data Access Schema (DAS) on an on-going basis. DAS provides views to facilitate integration with external systems requiring this data. The inventory information provided includes current inventory available, on order and in-transit, along with the pertinent dates related to on order and in-transit, such as expected in-stock date for all customer orderable items and locations.
The OMS and the OOC will run periodic extracts from DAS throughout the day, which will provide them an update of inventory positions that will be stored in their application’s local database.
During the order creation process, the OOC will verify inventory is available to fulfill the order using its local copy of inventory (3A), or by exception validating inventory availability via RMS (3B).
Note: 3B shows the OOC validating inventory against RMS, however the retailer can configure their system to point to either SIM or RMS for this validation. Also, Oracle Retail assumes retailers will use a local source copy of inventory as its default method for checking inventory availability and will only use the real time inventory availability lookup process in exception cases, such as for items with low stock on hand, or fast selling items.
Optional - During the order sourcing and fulfillment process, the OMS may also verify inventory is available to fulfill the order using its local copy of inventory (4A), or by exception validating inventory availability via RMS (4B) or SIM. See note above under point 3.
