Freight API: Its Role In Your Supply Chain

There are many ways to make your shipping operation or business more efficient, but none may be as easy to implement as a freight API. In fact, the right freight API can streamline and bolster your supply chain, enabling greater productivity and more cost savings across the board.

Today, let’s break down the role of freight API in your business’s supply chain.

What Is Freight API?

A freight shipping API or application programming interface is a software solution that seamlessly integrates multiple programs or platforms, enabling them to exchange data or communicate. When used properly, a freight API can automate freight shipping tasks, integrate several platforms, and improve the operational efficiency of your organization.

Depending on the freight API you use, it may do many different things. Freight APIs can do things like:

Assist with booking freight or quoting freight shipping prices
Locating or tracking freight in transit
Streamlining manual shipping processes that otherwise slow down supply chains
And much more

A freight API is like the central nervous system for your entire operation's supply chain.

With your API running smoothly, you will be able to do a number of things.

You won’t need as large of a team to manage freight shipments. Instead, one or two people can manage the entire thing for you, letting you distribute your labor more effectively.
You can expand the volume you ship almost immediately without scaling the rest of your business, like hiring more team members or expanding your warehouse.
Thanks to your API's automated features, you can quote, track, book, and validate shipments much more quickly. It can reduce human error (or even eliminate it) at every step of the process. You won’t have to worry, for instance, about an employee typing the wrong address and sending a cargo shipment to the wrong side of the country.
You can always know where your data is, which will reduce the time you have to spend on administrative or organizational busywork

Why Should You Use an API?

There are many benefits to using a freight API for your supply chain and your organization overall. Let’s take a look at some of these benefits one by one.

Highly Automated

Integrating and using a freight API in your supply chain allows for real-time automation of valuable business processes. APIs can offer logistics providers visibility of their cargo and all moving parts in real time.

For example, say that you need to process credit card transactions for your company. When you start using a freight API, that API can integrate with your CRM or customer relationship management software, including ancillary software tools like painting gateways or credit card gateways.

In this way, your API will automatically transfer funds to specialized accounts, send payment receipts to your CRM software, and facilitate other information transfers. Furthermore, freight APIs can automate freight route planning and quotes for customers.

This happens in real-time, meaning that your clients and customers get the most up-to-date information and prices possible: a key benefit in this competitive industry. It all adds up to more cost savings, improved efficiency, and better shipping times for freight.

Easy Customization

In addition, freight APIs enable greater customization for you and your clients or customers.

Depending on the tool you use, your API may be able to make custom user experiences for specific customers or longtime clients. In this way, you can make positive, memorable experiences for your clients, building important relationships with them in the process.

This benefit doesn’t just extend to your customers, of course. Regular users, such as your employees or yourself, will also benefit from customization tools to make using the API quicker and easier than ever.

The more you use your freight API, the more it will fit your organization and your unique business challenges.

Informational Integration

As mentioned above, using a freight shipping API means you’ll benefit from greater informational integration throughout your organization. APIs are communication tools first and foremost; they facilitate the easy transfer of data from platform to platform and app to app.

With a freight API working for your company, your different platforms, applications, and software tools will all be able to communicate quickly and easily. No longer will you have to transcribe data by hand and input it into multiple machines or software programs manually. Instead, your API will transfer the data from place to place.

This saves you a ton of time and money and allows you and your employees to focus more on other aspects of your business, like getting cargo where it needs to be on time.

Aside from these benefits, APIs are also advantageous because:

They are much more flexible compared to other software solutions, like EDIs. This is valuable because new technology is always on the horizon, and a freight API will adapt to the new technology better than the alternative.
They don’t require as much maintenance compared to other software tools. You won’t have to spend nearly as many man-hours or as much money updating or maintaining your API software.
APIs come with embedding functions, enabling you to embed important content on any website you need to. This results in a better user experience and your business's online presence overall.

Are APIs Better Than EDIs?

Although freight APIs are similar to EDIs, or electronic data interchanges, there are some major differences to keep in mind. Both of these software tools electronically exchange data between organizations or enterprises. EDIs were invented before APIs, first hitting the market in 1975.

That said, EDIs can only transmit data in a few limited formats, like XML, UBL, ANSI, EDIFACT, and so on. In contrast, APIs can transmit data in different formats between systems and, more importantly, don't have to change the data format to do the transmitting.

Furthermore, APIs are usually faster and cheaper for shipping operations and businesses of all sizes. EDIs aren't always available for small to medium-sized businesses, usually because the money and time needed to implement them are quite significant.

On top of that, EDIs are widely regarded as obsolete by many in the industry already. Since many shipping companies and organizations already use APIs — given their ease of maintenance and cost-effectiveness — it doesn’t make sense to start using EDIs when they are available alternatives.

The Bottom Line

In the end, a freight API could significantly improve your organization. Given its wider applicability and flexibility relative to EDIs, there’s no reason not to use a supply chain provider that currently incorporates APIs.

That’s where RPM comes in. As knowledgeable and experienced end-to-end transportation providers, we’re quite experienced in the benefits and effectiveness of freight APIs. That’s why we use freight APIs for our own supply chain processes and for our clients.

Sources:
What is an API? - API Beginner's Guide | AWS
What is EDI: Electronic Data Interchange? | IBM
What is EDI (Electronic Data Interchange)? | EDIBasics.com