ServusConnect Blog Open APIs and Integrations

Open APIs may not sound like the most exciting thing in the world but they are crucially important in a forward thinking and technology enabled business. Businesses now are seeing the value of having technology enabled services that can make your business run better, keep better records, and allow you to have insights into your business. But what good is all of that extra information and automation if it's costing you many man hours in order to get those systems running and keep them fed with the information they need in the form of manual data entry. Rather than this manual data entry, how is it possible to get these systems to talk to each other? The answer is APIs or Application Program Interfaces. These APIs establish a way for programs to communicate with each other and help them move data through them. They are are what allow programs to move your data around to where you need it. These are what make your program smarter than just putting all of your data into an excel table and calling it a day.The next aspect of these APIs is making them open, or able to integrate with other software systems in order to transfer and organize that data. Many firms look for a one program solution to all their technology needs but this can be impractical. Some aspects of such a large, inflexible system are not the best solutions to your specific business needs. The next step would be to customize these systems or build your own proprietary software, but that can be time consuming and expensive as well. The solution and the best balance for a lot of these problems is to use another software solution that more closely meets your needs. Often by doing this however, you are losing that ease of integration and data that you had previously. Again, another work around is needed, this is where Open APIs come in. the fact that the APIs are open mean that programmers have access to figure out how their program can talk to another. These open APIs mean that after a program is set up to talk to another, the transfer of data is much easier.Applying this technology to mobile maintenance and ServusConnect in particular we are seeing huge gains in time and data entry and exports from systems. Rather than printing out a work order(Export) and then manually reentering that data once its complete(Import), ServusConnect automatically pulls and pushes that data to and from your current system. Saving you time and paper while protecting the integrity of your data. After all, isn't a new technology supposed to make life easier?