It all starts in integrations
Making your Bushel-powered app come to life starts somewhere. That is the integration process.
How integrations work
The Bushel platform is hosted in Google Cloud. This allows us to have quick responses for users, back up data, and to allow grain facilities who run multiple ERP’s the opportunity to present the data in one mobile app to their growers.
We extract data from the grain buyer’s database and insert it in our own database. This is how that works:
1 We create a secure tunnel with the grain facility’s database and acquire read-only access to that data.
2 Once we have access to the data, developers determine where the data is located and how to successfully interpret that data.
Finding the data is slow and tedious with many dead ends. However, we have been very successful completing that work with four different ERPs.
Introducing APIs
As Bushel has progressed and grown, we have been able to make a connection to grain facility databases by communicating through APIs (Application Programming Interface).
An API is a defined method that computers communicate amongst other computers.
When we utilize data spelunking, we are essentially creating an API to translate that data from the grain facility’s database to ours. Now, grain facilities and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software providers are developing or opening up their own API to communicate with Bushel and vice versa.
Full process:
1 Bushel makes a request to an ERP provider for all the tickets for Customer XYZ.
2 The ERP API pulls that data and responds to Bushel by providing the tickets for Customer XYZ.
3 Bushel then puts that data in its database for the grower and updates in the grower’s mobile app.
Boom, boom, boom.
Why APIs
The use of an API connection is preferred over the translator connection because:
1 It lowers maintenance cost
2 Decreases product delivery timelines
3 Allows for quicker development of new features.
Our plan in the future is to work with ERP providers to create or improve their API so that we can move off of the of the tunnel and translator.