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).