An alternative to the bulky, costly, and partly-automated EDI that we discussed yesterday, is the Supply Chain API.
API is very famous these days, and being adopted for a wide range of applications. It’s great that it’s available easily for Supply Chain domain too. The traditional EDI software players tend to downplay API saying that it’s brittle and not secure, which is not true. APIs are executed over https which is pretty secure, and there are the standard protocol transactions which can ensure supply chain transactions interactions. Not that I’m leaning towards any particular implementation, but just putting it out so that you know the alternatives.
REST APIs are mostly commonly used, and thus can be developed & tested with any API testing tool of one’s choice. The important part is to understand the underlying business processes of transactions and the message interactions, so that the testing can be effective.
In the next few blogs, I intend to go deeper into some of the WMS implementations and see how they use the APIs. As such, it’s a bit involved because the WMS software are varied in their approach, and have their own bells and whistles, but I’ll try my best to bring out key information.
In the mean time, here’s DHL’s WMS API example that you can go through. Enjoy!
Testing Supply Chain software is complex, and it needs careful planning and expertise. If you have a need to test your WMS implementations or any new platforms of digital transformation automation for Logistics and Supply Chain, please feel free to get in touch with me for advisory test consulting and implementation of Supply Chain API. I look forward to hear from you!