Comments and letters: Already fueled for API

  As an industry association that provides trusted, leading pricing and transit-time tools, we’ve moved through several generations of technology, providing desktop-rating tools on CDs, then application products on the web, and most recently system-to-system integration via the SMC³ cloud. 

  To fit the evolving needs of our customers, we will soon be introducing a strategic industry platform to the marketplace. This revolutionary tool aggregates various lightweight transactional messaging data with our market intelligence, creating a unique product that includes both transactional communications between trading partners and analytical functionality that works with our core products. In this way, SMC³ will help write the future of messaging in the transportation arena.   

  Any conversation about messaging and API must also deal with EDI, which is used by large shippers and their logistic partners to manage significant content pieces. EDI isn’t limited—in fact, EDI messages may contain more information than API exchanges—but is simply a different form of communication. EDI is used to manage inventory and purchase orders, among other things.

  EDI is currently entrenched in parts of the industry, and this type of messaging is certainly not dying out. To switch to API, shippers and receivers who have used EDI for decades would have to make a large investment in time and money, while also sacrificing the level of detail and global services EDI currently provides. While some in the industry are painting messaging as an “either/or” case (much like the less-than-truckload debate over density and classification rates), at SMC³, we see the two types of messaging co-existing for some time. There are currently around 100 EDI sets used by the transportation industry, and API startups are only concentrating on bringing five or six messaging sets to the market.

  As an industry leader, we talk extensively about new trends with shippers, carriers, 3PLs and software alliance partners, and we’re developing innovative APIs with many emerging 3PLs, carriers and shippers. It’s misleading, though, to imply that freight transportation is behind the ball in its adoption of APIs or, for that matter, it’s a given that a switch to API messaging will be beneficial for all. While web services are becoming more common in a variety of technologies, such as the mobile space, there are a number of sectors where EDI communication is still standard.

  Our product line is fueled by web service APIs and has been that way for almost a decade. SMC³ will continue to grow as technology allows and continue to develop innovative, reliable tools to enhance industry communications. 

Danny Slaton

COO and executive vice president, 

SMC³,  

Peachtree City, Ga.