How do I configure Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) for my Amazon integration?

Overview

Integrating Finale Inventory with Amazon Warehousing and Distribution (AWD) is very beneficial for businesses looking to take advantage of AWD's automated replenishment while maintaining a global view of inventory levels across AWD and internal warehouses in one central system. With this integration, you can automatically sync inventory data between Amazon and Finale for your AWD stock levels and shipments, ensuring that Finale is always the source of truth even for AWD inventory levels. 

This guide will walk you through the step-by-step process of enabling the Amazon AWD integration within Finale Inventory, allowing you to leverage the full power of automated inventory management and focus on growing your business.

Prerequisites

• Products have already been created in Finale
• Product Lookups for Amazon AWD SKUs have already been created and mapped to associated Product IDs

How To Configure Product Lookups

Connect your Amazon AWD integration or enable AWD for existing Amazon integration

• If Amazon is not yet added as an integration, you can do so by going to the Integrations page and clicking "Add new integration" at the bottom of the page (for new accounts without any existing integrations, you will be taken directly to the "Add new integration" page)
• Connect Amazon integration using the steps shown on the configuration screen
• After completing the above steps or if your Amazon integration is already connected to Finale, you should see the following task highlighted below. If not click here.

• Once this task is available Finale will automatically create various System locations to manage your Amazon AWD stock levels using this task. You can find these system-generated locations/sublocations in Applications Settings>>Facilities tab

• Return to the integrations page and locate the task “Inventory Sync for FBA” Edit this task by selecting “Actions” and “Edit Task Configuration” from the drop-down menu.
• Follow the guidelines on this page regarding the configuration setup.
  • Task run mode

    • A.  Disabled - This is the default setting.  Finale will not attempt to sync down information from Amazon in this mode.

      B.  Manual - When configured to 'Manual', Finale will only sync down shipments/orders when invoked by the user.  The user will force a manual sync by clicking on "Run Task Now" link from the Action menu of the Inventory sync for FBA task.

      C.  Automatic - When configured to 'Automatic', Finale will sync down new shipments/orders from Amazon every five minutes.  Most customers have this setting on 'Automatic' mode.

  • Import stock quantities options (Mandatory) 
    • Import AWD Inventory: The first dropdown menu lets you enable and disable the AWD portion of the integration task. The second dropdown menu designates which sublocation Finale reduces stock from to facilitate the movement of inventory from your warehouse to AWD.
    • Default variance reason: Adds the selected reason code to all stock takes done by the  integration.

• AWD import filter date

• This section is valuable if you have transfers currently in transit to AWD. If you do, set the date to back to the oldest date that an active transfer was initiated, otherwise set to the current date. 

** Note that all other settings in this integration task are for FBA stock level, sales order, and transfer order syncing. If you have not enabled your FBA specific settings, please reference the below article.

How do I configure FBA for my Amazon integration?

At this point, the expectation is that the account has all FBA/AWD SKUs in Finale as product lookups and they are assigned to the correct Product IDs. This is critical to ensure that inventory numbers created by the integration are set to the correct Product IDs in Finale. Failure to ensure this is correct will result in inaccurate information in Finale. 

Verification

• Return to the top of the configuration Page and set the "Select when task runs" option to "Automatic."
  
  • Finale will import any  transfer shipments from Amazon into Finale from the date set in the AWD import filter date setting, creating a recent log of transfer shipments and AWD inventory levels. 
    
    • Open shipments should show as “Committed,” while closed ones should show as “Completed.”
    • “Draft” transfer orders typically refer to transfer orders with unmapped SKUs that should be corrected as soon as possible. 
      • Draft orders also reflect “Working” state orders in Amazon that haven’t yet been picked up by the carrier.
      • Why are my transfer orders stuck in "Draft" status? 
    • Adjusting Inventory levels from Default Origin Sublocation.
      • This location should show some reduced/negative values if transfer shipments were imported into Finale. 
      • We will want to create inventory adjustments to account for this. 
        • We recommend using the stock take option to remove any negative inventory created due to historical transfers. 
        • How To Perform Stock Take