The Business Case

A 3rd party logistics company landed a new client who mandated an integration with Salesforce as a part of their contract.  The new client had already been using Salesforce for some time and their inbound sales order taking team depended on it. The 3rd party logistics company used 3PL Central to handle their orders and run their warehouse.  Bridge was hired by the 3rd party logistics company to bridge the gap and integrate the two systems.

The API Integration

Simply enough, new orders needed to flow from Salesforce to 3PL Central for picking, packing and shipping.  Once daily, 3PL Central would update Salesforce with the order status and tracking number for existing orders. 

 

Both software platforms had API’s (Application Programmer Interface), however neither system had the ability to automatically schedule the update of order status and tracking number.  Additionally, although both systems had API’s, the fields of each system did not match exactly, so some programming logic needed to be put in place to transform the data from one system before inserting it into the other system. 

 

Bridge solved both problems by building a small middleware program.  The program transformed and mapped the data and so that it was compatible with both systems.  Bridge also set up a scheduled task that would automatically update Salesforce with the order status and tracking number in 3PL Central at every few minutes, allowing near real time data updates.  The result was a fully compatible and seamless integration of two systems that were nearly compatible, but not quite compatible enough without a little extra programming.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce is the worlds #1 Cloud-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Publicly traded, Salesforce has over $8 billion dollars in revenue and services over 150,000 clients worldwide.  For more information about Salesforce, visit https://www.salesforce.com/products/what-is-salesforce/

What is 3PL Central?

3PL Central is the most popular Cloud-based warehouse management software in the 3rd party logistics and warehousing industry. 3PL Central has serviced nearly 1000 clients over the last decade.  For more information about 3PL Central, visit https://3plcentral.com/about-us/