Master data and templates

In this section:

Master data is data that is referred to in different transactions (shipments), and examples are alert, product, subscription, template, or location data. This data changes less frequently than transactional data.

Master data can be sourced from customer backend systems such as:

Supply Chain Management Systems (SCM)
Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
Logistics Management Systems (LMS)

Master data templates

Master-data templates play a key role in the Integrations API. They enable a modular, flexible and fast approach to shipment creation by employing a convention-over-configuration approach to data entry.

This system can be automated to help reduce accidental user-input errors by ensuring that support data needed for shipment creation is automatically generated by your support systems and databases.

Location data

Integrating location data

We highly recommend having location data directly integrated between your ERP/WHM system and Controlant. The automation that comes with integration is essential for a smooth scale-up, when you go from a pilot project with one shipping site and a handful of receiving sites over to hundreds/thousands of sites and shipments each day.

Reduces a lot of manual work for the customers on shipment/location creation.
Reduces manual input errors, which reduces the effort made in correcting said errors.
Reduces work on Controlant for reverse logistics and thus ensures higher reusability count per device.

Recommended integration flow

The most robust integration method would be to utilize our Integrations API for location data when shipment creation occurs. The following flow is used by our largest clients with great success.

Creating a shipment

Create origin location with reference = origin1.
Create destination location reference = destination1.
Create shipment using the reference parameters used in steps 1 and 2.

This way we have a single, static, robust process for creating locations based on the source of truth which is your source systems. Controlant ensures that we do not create reference duplicates. So even though you are creating thousands of shipments between the same lanes and call Create Location for the same reference we check whether we already have an existing location reference stored to avoid duplicates.

Interface/ endpoint

https://integrations.controlant.com/api-reference/

Temperature specifications

All temperature values in the Integrations API are in degrees Celsius and scaled up by 10. This is done to support a single decimal value but limit the risk of encountering rounding errors that are commonly associated with numbers that contain a decimal point.

Temperature scaling

Value 375 translates to 37.5°C.
Value -253 translates to -25.3°C.
Value 3 translates to 0.3°C.

Example

A transport conditions definition for a product to set the ideal transport conditions to 2 - 8°C would be defined as follows:

"transportConditions": {
  "lowerTemperatureThreshold": 20, //2.0°C
  "upperTemperatureThreshold": 80 //8.0°C
},