[Music] hi everyone my name is sha Walker I'm a principal product success architect here at service now today I'm going to be talking to you about one of the advanced inventory features distribution channels distribution channels link two geographically related stock rooms together configuring your stock room to use distribution channels can help with the Fulfillment steps of the request process and any other processes that require there to be inventory transferred from one stock room to another distribution channels allow inventory managers to predetermine which stock room should be used to transfer stock to and from they also allow for preference order to be established so that additional stock rooms can be used should no stock be available in the preferred stock room a good example will be if you have a primary stock room geographically located on the west coast and also have a local stock rooms throughout the West Coast when the user requests new hardware asset the fulfiller will try and Source the new assets from local stock which is the stock room located at the same location as the user if local stock is not available the fulfiller will have the option to fulfill the request by issuing a transfer order when this option is selected a list of stock rooms available is presented to the fulfiller when the distribution channels have been configured the fulfiller will only see the list of available assets from the distribution Channel stock rooms this helps the fulfiller in determining the best source to transfer assets from Shipping assets from a distribution channel that is geographically logical usually provides cheaper and quicker ship times for the assets in this example example if there's no local stock and no stock available in a distribution Channel it could likely make more sense to purchase new hardware assets for this request rather than transferring an asset from a stock room on the East Coast or even overseas let me jump into an instance and demonstrate this in action okay so I'm now logged into a Vancouver instance with Hardware Asset Management installed and I'm going to show you how distribution channels work from the fulfiller side the first thing I'm going to need to do is I'm going to impersonate a user so I'm going to impersonate a user from Ottawa and then I'm actually going to submit a service request as this user so this user is looking for a new laptop and they would like an Apple MacBook Pro 15 so they they're going to go ahead and order this laptop and our Quest has been created now I'm going to end my impersonation and go in as the fulfiller so the fulfiller is going to go to the hardware asset workspace so they can see the request so I go to procurement requests and I can see that this request has been created for the Ottawa user which pending approval now normally this will go through the proper approval chain and Eric would have to approve this I'm just going to go ahead and pretend I'm Eric and approve this request so it moves through to the next phase okay so once the request has been approved a catalog task has been created to be able to Source the asset so the filler needs to determine do I have any stock of this asset or do I need to order any so I'm going to click on the source request and we can see here I'm just going to remove that check mark sorry um we you can see here that there is no local stock for this particular request so that means that the filler needs to make the decision on whether they transfer stock from another location or they create a purchase order so right now in the system I don't have any distribution channels configured so what what my options are are going to basically be any stock room globally that has inventory of this particular ass asset type so you can see the fulfiller could pick something maybe they pick the Southern California warehouse and they want to transfer the asset from the Southern California warehouse the problem with this is that this is in a different country and it's also on a pretty much completely different Coast so the ship time is going to take a long time to get from Southern California all the way to up to Ottawa in Canada so not only that it would have to go through customs so really choosing this option is not a viable option so if fillers aren't really sure which one they should pick um the inventory managers can go ahead and set up distribution channels will help which will help them with that decision making process so I'm just going to cancel this and not fulfill this request this time oops and what we're going to do now is we are going to go in and we are going to set up um distribution channels so you can see how they behave so I'm going to go into my stock rooms and this user was located in Ottawa and the Ottawa stock room as you can see has no local stock of anything so this is where I can pick choose to select my distribution channels and say okay what's my main distribution point for for this stock room so I know I'm in Ottawa so I'm going to set up a new channel stock room for the Canada east stock room this stock room is located in Toronto so it's a short um 3-hour drive three and 1 half hour drive from Ottawa so this is the closest stock room to be able to fulfill requests from so I'm going to give it a rank of one since it's the closest stock room and I'm going to save this so now that I have this set up I can come back to my request and choose my source request and what I'm going to do is enable this option to Source through distribution channels and you can see there's still nothing in the local stock room because Ottawa doesn't have anything but now it's gone from what was it um 10 or so transfer trouble stock down to one and when I hit the transfer button it automatically populates the only stock room which is the the Canada e stock room and it will create a transfer order from that preferred stock room I'm going to cancel this again and just show you what you can do in terms of Orders of Precedence so if I come back to my Ottawa stock room and I want to set up a secondary stock room so okay if there's none available in the Canada east stock room the next logical choice would be the Canada West stock room it's it's considerably farther away however there's no International borders to have to cross and so you don't have to clear customs and all that kind of stuff so these are really my only two options for other stock rooms listed in Canada so I'm going to set this as the second precedent because it is further away so we really don't want to pick from that location if we don't have to so I'm going to hop back over to uh my request again I'm going to hit the source request and now you can see there's two transferable stock available so if I hit the transfer button I now have the option to pick either the Canada east or the Canada West stock room one more thing I wanted to show you is just let me reverse the rank just so you can see how the rank affects which one will be displayed so I'm going to go back to my number one and we're going to change this to a two and save that and then I'm going to come back to my candada West stock room and I'm going change this to be the primary again and we wouldn't really want to do this I just want to show you how the Precedence order works so again now when I come back to my request and I hit my source request I can see still two transferable assets but now the order is reversed so you can set up a process for your fulfillers to make sure they're always picking the first stock room in the list um which is going to be the most logical based off of what you've determined to be the quickest the cheapest the best um transfer methods so that's how you would configure distribution channels for stock rooms and set the order of Precedence so you can help your fulfillers really fulfill inventory from the best locations that makes the most sense for your users and financially for your company I hope you found this thing helpful thank you