Entopy continues to innovate in the supply chain visibility space. Focus remains on the ‘in-transit’ parts of the supply chain and Entopy continues to seek ways to provide more value to all stakeholders in this area.
Entopy’s platform enables in-transit visibility at consignment level and provides outputs such as these goods, on this vehicle, are located here and this has happened. However, Entopy’s role in projects can vary. The platform can act as a full solution from data collection through to visualisation or; Entopy can take the role of ‘the middleman’, collecting, processing and transforming data and feeding the outputs into other systems as part of a wider solution. To facilitate the latter role, Entopy’s API central provides many tools to enable the extraction of data from the Entopy core platform.
Our approach
The Entopy team typically provides the initial engineering resource to make the necessary connections with the target systems and configure the Entopy platform to deliver the desired outputs. Once the systems are connected to Entopy, a simple to understand, consumption based API model ensures costs are aligned with value.
Entopy’s approach delivers a one-stop-shop for visibility and removes a lot of complexity from the process. However, the new updates to API central recognise that in some cases, in-house engineering resource is the preferred route to integrating the Entopy platform.
Bespoke visibility
A key differentiator of the Entopy platform is its ability to provide ‘bespoke visibility’. This means providing visibility of the consignments/loads of interest and nothing more. The benefits of this approach centre around privacy and cost which is achieved through targeted data capture.
Entopy’s unique ‘Virtual Inventory Environments’ technology (learn more here) enables the creation of virtual objects (consignments/loads) to which vehicle and GPS tracking data is associated and combined. The platform is configured using unique ‘triggers’ that are used to determine when to collect data and from which systems. These ‘triggers’ may, for example, be a certain consignment type, a value of consignment, a customer or destination of consignment etc. Again, Entopy can (and typically does) work closely with the end users to configure the platform to delivered the desired output.
Updates to support self-service
A key focus of the v6 release is the inclusion of self-service inbound API’s which allow users to start to generate and control their own triggers. This is an important step toward making the Entopy platform more self-service and giving more control to external developers.
Future releases will look to enable system connections to become more self-service and allow users/developers to leverage the unique tools and capabilities that the Entopy core platform has to offer.
A growing need for in-transit visibility
More and more, solution providers are looking to include in-transit visibility within their end services. The use of location data associated with the object/goods of interest (and additional information) can be used to improve communication, drive automation, improve data accuracy and much more.
In-transit visibility at consignment level (or the ‘logistics data around goods in-transit’) is often a data gap in many solutions, and is often very tricky to obtain/configure in a cost effective and operational viable way. But it is a gap/challenge that the Entopy platform can certainly help to fill. Advances to Entopy API central, the continued growth in use of and advances to the core Entopy platform and a simple to understand, Flexi-API consumption model position Entopy very well to support businesses and solution providers through the next phases of supply chain digitalisation.