Norce Commerce Availability structures

Norce Commerce offers a flexible and dynamic method for displaying availability information on applications. You can set up automatic integration of on-hand product information across the different warehouses, and use Norce's business rules and configurations to determine which data to present to applications for the most accurate availability promise possible.

Availability shown on a product

A product or variant in Norce Commerce Services will give three different on-hand information elements:

• OnHand This information is based on an aggregation of all warehouses (and their locations) configured for the specific application and price list used.
• OnHandStore This information based on an aggregation of all stores that are added to the storeSeed parameter and have store warehouses. You can find storeId's by calling ListStores2 in the application service.
• OnHandSupplier This is availability information from the primary supplier chosen based on rules in Norce for the specific price list used.

Important fields

• Value' : The number of units currently available in the warehouse, except for those already reserved by Norce (if reservations are enabled for the client)
• IncomingValue and NextDeliveryDate : If more items are ordered from the supply chain, the incoming value shows how many are on the way, and the next delivery date is the estimated time of arrival to the warehouse for the earliest batch.
• LeadTimeDayCount : The number of days (or other time unit specified in the setup) it approximately takes to ship items to the customer.
• IsReturnable : A flag that can be set from the source of the on-hand information, for example the supplier can inform that this particular item is non-returnable (to them).
• Info : This field is empty when returned with product data but is used to provide extended information when returned for specific warehouse information (see below).

Other fields on Product (and Variant)

• StockDisplayBreakPoint : This value can be set in Norce (Stock Breakpoint) either on the category or on the product (variant). It is a marker that can signal certain behavior in the availability logic. For example, if a product has 5 units left, and the StockDisplayBreakPoint is set to 10, instead of showing the number of units left in the app, a text such as "only a few left" should be displayed.
• IsDropShipOnly : This flag can be set in Norce Commerce (Drop ship only) either on the category or on the product (variant). When enabled, Norce handles the product differently in the business rules, and the availability logic should signal that the supplier on-hand information should be used instead of the local on-hand (even if the value is greater than 0).

About interpreting availability data

There's almost always a client-specific logic to set up in the presentation layer. As described above, Norce Commerce returns the On Hand values and other information that can be used for setting up different availability display options.

The important fields mentioned above (excluding on-hand value) can be used more freely to represent whatever is desired. For instance, LeadTimeDayCount, IncomingValue, and NextDeliveryDate can be utilized to more specifically convey the intended message to the presentation layer. In this way, a source system can communicate a more direct message to the presentation layer. While Info types can also help with this, they will only be displayed on on-hand checks and not on the aggregated values. For more information about how to extend the availability data, refer to the documentation on extending availability.

Read about how to extend the availability data here.

Example 1 - B2C use case

Suppose a B2C app that doesn't want to show the exact number of units but wants to give a fair availability promise to the end-customer. The following table provides an example of how to decide what to display in the frontend:

Example 2 - B2B use case

A B2B app that would show more detailed information to the end-customer:

On Hand checks

There are other ways to obtain availability data without retrieving it together with the products.

• GetProductOnHandByPartNo and GetProductOnHandByProductId : These two methods require a list of specific warehouses to query on-hand for a specific product, and return on-hand information on each warehouse in the list. No aggregation (like in Product calls) is done, and the call bypasses the Norce Commerce Services cache.
• ListProductOnHandByBasket : This method is similar to the methods above, but instead of a productId , it takes a basketId and returns availability information for all products in the basket.

[
    {
        "_Comment" : "Example of how the warehouse input looks",
        "WarehouseId": 529,
        "LocationId": 529
    },
    {
        "StoreId": 268
    },
    {
        "StoreId": 269
    },
    {
        "WarehouseId": 4131,
        "LocationId": 4131
    }
]

Warehouse and StoreId can be found by calling Listwarehouseinfo.

Reservations

Norce Commerce provides a reservation functionality that can be enabled for clients. When an order is created, reservations are added to the product for the standard warehouse on the used price list. The next time Norce returns availability, the on-hand value will be reduced by the reservation value. This way, you can handle availability promises for sensitive products. The reservation is cleared when a new on-hand update is passed in to Norce on the warehouse.

Example:

1. A product purchased on the Standard pricelist. The warehouse set as “Standard” for the price list used gets reservations.

2. These reservations are shown in the admin. This client has reservation enabled and in this case, 3 pcs are reserved for a product:

Note that 515 is not the stored OnHand value, it is actually 518.

3. When getting OnHand for the specific warehouse from Norce we get:

4. Later, a new OnHand value is passed in through connect:

The reservation is then set to 0 and Onhand is set to the new value 510.

To enable Reservation functionality set up UseOnHandSubstraction in client settings.

How to configure availability in Admin

Set up warehouses and locations

When setting up availability in Admin, it's important to create warehouses for all places of unit storage, and add a location as well. Here's what you need to consider:

• Code : This identifier is used by integrations and imports, and should mirror the identifiers in source systems.
• Type : This refers to the type of warehouse, which could be:
  • Warehouse : The common warehouse for online distribution
  • Store : Specific for physical stores
  • Transport : An in-transit warehouse (very seldom used)
  • Other : Other types of warehouses that should not be shown in aggregated availability logic.
• Primary : This is the default warehouse for the client. Only one warehouse can be primary (optional).
• Lead time : This is the number of days (or any other time unit that is used in the setup) it approximately takes to ship items to the customer. This value can be overridden on the product or variant.
• Primary pricelist : This points to the price list that is primarily associated with this warehouse. Usually, it's the main market price list.
• Included in stock calculation : This enables the warehouse to be part of the aggregation of stocks when Norce returns availability data.

Which type of warehouse to choose?

There are two scenarios in which the warehouse type are used by Norce Commerce:

1. Aggregated availability data
   OnHand and OnHandStore display aggregated information from two types of warehouses, Warehouse and Store . The other two types Other and Transport are not aggregated and the only way to see information about them is by calling the On hand check methods .
2. Status rules
   Some status rules use on-hand information to determine if the status of a product should change. These in-stock-based status rules are only using warehouses of the type Warehouse . The other are ignored. Read more about this here: Product status rules, In-stock based rules

Configure availability for applications, price lists

To restrict Norce Commerce from aggregating all warehouse information for all applications, it is required to set up a connection between the price lists and the warehouses.

For example, the European market price list includes the European central warehouse and the large European physical stores, while the Swedish market price list includes both the Swedish central warehouse as well as the European (as it serves the whole of Europe) and the Swedish physical stores.

Only one warehouse can be marked as “standard”, which means that it will recieve reservations from all orders on the price list.

Supplier On Hand configuration

To display supplier availability data, there are a few configurations that need to be set up.

1. Make sure that the supplier is enabled as the chosen supplier.
2. Connect the supplier price list to the supplier warehouse.
3. Connect the supplier price list to the price list.

By configuring this, Norce Commerce will retrieve the on-hand information from the current best prices price list, locate the supplier warehouse that is connected, and return its on-hand data as availability.

Import or integrate On Hand data

Onhand data can be manually updated in the Admin UI, imported from excel files, and integrated using Norce Commerce Connect.

In Connect, client on-hand data is imported using

• ImportOnhands (in the product service)

while supplier on-hand information is imported together with other supply catalog data using

• ImportProducts (in the supplier service)

Suggested further reading

• Onhand integrations in Product and pricing integrations
• Supplier integrations
• Availability on bundle products
• Additional information on availability