The Aggregated Inventory for LS Central module is designed to tackle a significant challenge faced by businesses dealing with a high number of transactions. As transaction volumes increase, standard processes in Business Central, in particular adjust and post inventory costs, tend to become time-consuming bottlenecks.
With Aggregated Inventory, the system consolidates inventory transactions from multiple store locations into a single aggregated location. This consolidation decreases the number of Item Ledger Entries, leading to faster execution of processes mentioned earlier.
The Aggregated Inventory Entries store the detailed information about inbound and outbound inventory movements at store locations. When Aggregated Inventory is activated, the Item Ledger Entries provide a consolidated view of inventory movements at the aggregated location. Meanwhile, the Aggregated Inventory Entries break down these movements into individual store locations, which are the actual sources of these transactions.
Note: It is important to note that Aggregated Inventory specifically deals with store locations and the aggregated location, not warehouse locations nor other virtual locations.
Statement Posting is a key area where Aggregated Inventory can significantly improve efficiency. For example, if the same items are sold across multiple stores, statement posting in LS Central would typically create separated Item Ledger Entries per item per store. With Aggregated Inventory activated, however, these sales are aggregated as a single Item Ledger Entry per item in the aggregated location. While this is a simplified example, factors like variants, posting date, and dimensions also play a role in determining whether sales get aggregated. The aggregation rate directly affects performance — a higher aggregation rate leads to faster execution of the adjust and post inventory costs processes.
Inventory movements are recorded using documents and journals. With Aggregated Inventory activated, documents and journals display both the source store locations and the aggregated location. When these documents and journals are posted, inventory is updated in the aggregated location. The Document Handling page outlines changes made to the standard processes such as releasing, reopening, posting, copying, and correcting documents. The Journal Handling page covers changes made to the standard journals including location switching, availability check, preview posting, and posting.
Aggregated Inventory can provide you with information about the available inventory at the individual store locations. This information is crucial for many retail processes and Integrations with other LS Central modules, including eCommerce, Mobile Inventory, Customer Orders, POS Inventory Look-up, as well as Store Inventory.
Our goal is to assist you in setting up and implementing Aggregated Inventory quickly and easily:
- The Master Data Configuration page provides an overview of the required setup data for the module.
- Take advantage of the Assisted Setup to guide you step by step through the go-live process.
- Check out the Implementation Guide page for detailed steps and explanations on why they are needed.
As Aggregated Inventory Entries track all inventory movements at the store level, this data will grow rapidly. While the adjust and post inventory costs processes remain unaffected by this, dealing with larger amounts of data in a table can lead to decreased performance. To address this, Data Compression and Archiving has been implemented to keep the data as small as possible. Aggregated Inventory Entries that meet specific criteria are grouped, compressed, and archived in batches. If needed, you have the option to undo these batches. The system can then decompress and restore the entries that were previously archived.
The following table lists Aggregated Inventory related topics to help you understand, set up, and use the module.
| To | See |
|---|---|
| Set up Locations, Item Journals, Retail Setup, and Scheduler Jobs. | Master Data Configuration |
| Understand how the Statement Posting process has changed. | Statement Posting |
| Understand what has changed for Sales, Purchases, and Transfer documents. | Document Handling |
| Understand what has changed for Item-, Reclassification-, and Revaluation Journals. | Journal Handling |
| Understand what changes have been made in Store Inventory. | Store Inventory |
| Understand how inventory is calculated for eCommerce, Mobile Inventory, Customer Orders, and POS Inventory Look-up. | Integrations |
| Implement Aggregated Inventory for LS Central. | Implementation Guidelines |
| Compress and archive Aggregated Inventory Entries. | Data Compression and Archiving |