Inventory Management with and without a Warehouse

Some businesses require mobile workers to use inventory directly from a dedicated warehouse, customer site, or service center, whereas some businesses require mobile workers to have available inventory. Oracle Field Service lets you manage inventory regardless of your business requirement.

A warehouse is a static place that holds inventory. A warehouse can also be a dedicated warehouse, a distribution center, the customer's site, a room, and so on. A warehouse can either belong to the company or the customer.

Inventory management with a warehouse: When your mobile workers use inventory directly from a warehouse, you can manage inventory using the warehouse resource. Routing also considers the required inventory based on the warehouse stock. When you use a warehouse to manage inventory, you assign a warehouse to each activity. Once a warehouse is assigned to an activity, mobile workers can find inventory using manual search or barcode scan, install required items, and return items as needed.

You can control the users who can provide access to warehouses based on the field resource's area of responsibilities. You can use the Visible Resources field to provide access to the required warehouse.

Here’s how you can use a warehouse to manage inventory:

Create a resource type for warehouse.
Create a resource for warehouse.
Add inventory to the warehouse.
View the inventory available in the warehouse.
Assign the warehouse to an activity.
Consume inventory from the warehouse.

Note: It's typically administrators who create a resource type and a resource for the warehouse. For more information, see the Administrating Oracle Field Service guide.

Inventory management without a warehouse: When your mobile workers use inventory from their own inventory pool and install it to a customer’s pool, you don’t need to create the warehouse resource type or warehouse resource. You can just add inventory manually or through APIs and assign them to the resource pool.