Channel Inventory 

Definition

The available stock of your products with your channel partners, logically grouped for unique combinations of product, channel partner, and acquisition price to the channel partner.

Use

Channel Inventory  enables you to:

·        Know the quantities of your products available in your distribution chain at any point of time, with the breakup of each channel partner’s available stock of each product based on the prices at which this stock was acquired.

·        Transparently Perform resale & claim message processing and price protection.

·        If you are considering a price cut decision on certain product lines, estimate your liability to channel partners as a result of their unsold stock.

Structure

·        It is a collection of logical aggregates called price buckets.

·        In Customizing, you maintain the Price Bucket Logical Key that comprises the parameters (apart from price) on which you want to breakup your channel inventory into price buckets.

¡        The default Price Bucket Logical Key comprises Sales Area, Channel Partner, and Product ID.

For more information, see:

IMG ® Customer Relationship Management ® Channel Management ® Channel Sales ® Channel Inventory and Resale Processing ® Channel Inventory Tracking ® Channel Inventory ® Enhancements ® Price Bucket Logical Key

Integration

Channel inventory comprises all price buckets maintained in your system.

The system updates channel inventory when you:

·        Process your channel sales transactions; that is, trigger any of the following functions:

¡        Update Channel Inventory with Sale to Channel Partner

¡        Update Channel Inventory with Return from Channel Partner

¡        Update Channel Inventory with Resale

¡        Update Channel Inventory with Return from Resale Customer

·        Perform channel inventory reconciliation

·        Make manual changes to price buckets