InventoryService

InventoryService is a software component that tracks and manages stock levels for products across warehouses, stores, and sales channels. It is commonly a part of larger enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems or deployed as a standalone microservice in modern architectures. The primary purpose is to provide real-time visibility into quantities on hand, allocated, ordered, and reserved, and to coordinate stock movements with purchasing, order management, and warehouse operations.

Data models typically include SKU, location, on-hand quantity, allocated quantity, on-order quantity, and attributes such as lot or serial numbers, expiration dates, and safety stock. The service supports multi-warehouse configurations, unit of measure conversions, and business rules for replenishment, stock transfers, and cycle counting. Core metadata, event history, and audit trails are commonly stored to support reconciliation and compliance.

Key operations include querying inventory status, adjusting stock on receipts or issues, reserving quantities to fulfill orders, releasing reservations, transferring stock between locations, and reconciling discrepancies. It commonly exposes REST or gRPC APIs and may publish or subscribe to event streams for inventory events, enabling integration with order management, procurement, and warehouse systems.

Integration and reliability considerations involve interoperability with order management, procurement, and fulfillment workflows. The service may rely on a distributed database with strong consistency guarantees or leverage eventual consistency with periodic reconciliation. Concurrency controls such as optimistic locking help prevent stock corruption during concurrent updates.

Deployment and scalability: InventoryService is typically deployed as a cloud-native component or containerized service, designed to scale with demand, provide failover capabilities, and support auditing and backups. In practice, it enables accurate stock visibility and informed replenishment decisions across an organization.