Siebel Field Service Guide > Service Inventories > About the Process Flow for Setting Up Service Inventories >

Inventory Locations

You use inventory locations to consolidate and manage all records pertaining to a service inventory. An inventory location can be a trunk for a field service engineer, a warehouse, or a portion of a warehouse, such as a shelf or an aisle. An inventory level specifies the availability and status of a product. You can add an inventory level to any location in an inventory structure. For more information about inventory locations, see Creating Inventory Locations (End User).

NOTE:  Inventory levels are product buckets in previous versions of Siebel Field Service.

Consider the following factors when setting up inventory locations:

• The inventory locations that you track using the Service Inventory module
• The inventory locations that you track using other means, such as an external back-office inventory application
• The number of hierarchical levels that apply to each inventory location

You can define different types of inventory locations. The following types of locations are basic to service inventory:

• Warehouse. The default inventory location. You define the inventory fulfillment and replenishment relationships for this inventory location. Also, you generate pick tickets at this location. You can define all other inventory locations as subcategories of the warehouse.
• Trunk. Mobile inventory that is assigned to a field service engineer. Each engineer has inventory for 1 trunk location.
• Field Office. Inventory that can supply several field service engineers. This location is an intermediate location between a warehouse and trunk inventory.
• Virtual. A logical, not a physical, inventory location. The External Location virtual location is essential for proper functioning of inventory transactions, and has a ROW_ID value of VIRTUAL_INVLOC. This location allows an inventory application to receive products from outside of the company. A virtual inventory location is the source, and the destination is a physical inventory location (for example, a shelf).

External Inventory Locations

The seed data in Siebel Field Service contains an inventory location value of External Location. This inventory location that has a Type field value of Virtual is the default inventory location if a source or destination location is not specified.

Inventory transactions can occur between organizations by using 2 transactions and the inventory location value of External Location as follows:

• The first transaction (Inv1) is from the source location in an organization to the External Location value. A user can view this transaction, and the External Location commits this transaction.
• The second transaction (Inv2) is from the External Location to the destination location in a different organization. A user can view this transaction, and the External Location value commits this transaction.

Do not delete the External Location record. The ROW_ID (VIRTUAL_INVLOC) makes this record unique. Some C⁺⁺ code in Siebel Field Service uses this ROW_ID. If you delete this record and re-create it, then the record is assigned a new ROW_ID and some inventory transactions fail. However, you can rename this record.

To make sure that all field service engineers in any organization in the company can use the External Location value, use the Organization field to associate all organizations in the company with the External Location value.

Trunk Inventory Locations

To manage trunk inventories, field service engineers record part movements on their laptop computers. They periodically connect their laptop computers to a Siebel Server and synchronize data.

To maximize performance during synchronization to and from the local database of the field service engineer, docking rules control the number and context of the records that are extracted, initialized, and synchronized. Because of these rules, an engineer might not see asset records needed to commit a field part movement for a serialized product. To solve this problem, the engineer can add the asset numbers. After synchronization, an administrator reconciles the add-in asset numbers with the corresponding Siebel database records, and the administrator commits the transaction. After the administrator commits the transaction, the field service engineer must synchronize again to update the local database.

After the field service engineer synchronizes the laptop computer in the field, an administrator can use the Parts Movement Administration view to review and commit transactions. For more information, see Committing Transactions from Mobile Computers.