In order for Visibility Hub to provide real-time visibility, it’s essential to know which vehicle is doing which transport. This is accomplished by bringing two data streams together: The transport information and the GPS feed from the vehicle. This process is called "vehicle allocation" and is done by assigning a vehicle via its license plate number to a transport described by its identification number.

While this seems to be a rather easy task, one can imagine that with dozens or even hundreds of shipments a day, a manual allocation for visibility purposes is quite an overhead. This allocation is anyway done as part of the carrier’s dispatching process and should therefore be automated. This can happen by sending this dispatch information from one machine (the carrier´s in-house IT system) to another machine (Visibility Hub and Transporeon) in the background without a need for manual user interaction: This can be enabled with a so called "API", short for Application Programming Interface.

So far so good, but there’s an important point to consider: Master data.

To make the best out of such an API connection, it’s critical that the vehicle and transport identification in both, the carrier’s inhouse IT system as well as Visibility Hub’s system, are consistent. But that might sometimes not be the case:

For vehicles, Visibility Hub retrieves the license plate number from the carrier’s GPS provider. The carrier maintains the format in the webportal of the GPS provider. This license plate notation can deviate significantly from the one that is known to the carrier’s in-house IT system. This is especially true, if vehicles are not directly owned by the carrier, but e.g. by a subcontractor.

For transports, Visibility Hub retrieves various identifiers, which are exposed in different fields. Examples are the shipper’s transport number, delivery, order number and others. As different customers might use different identifiers that are present in those fields, it’s important to know where to find the correct one for a given customer. Also, the format or notation might slightly differ, which makes it hard for a machine (and even for a human) to identify the correct one.

Small recap of what we have learned so far: Master data for the license plate and transport identification can be differently maintained in systems. As it's not easy to fix it in every system (different stakeholders, responsibilities, data owner etc), we're looking for a different solution approach.

To combat these challenges, Visibility Hub released an API update that significantly improves the matching of vehicle license plates and transport identifications by using a smart algorithm. This algorithm allows the notation to differ between one system and another, even takes partial matches into account and looks up a lot of available data to make the (perfect) match. Don’t worry, if this sounds complex to you, just take a look at the example below and you’ll learn that it’s quite simple.

Imagine you’re in a bakery and you’d like to get that incredible tasting bread that your friend recommended. You just can’t remember exactly what it was called and where to find it, but you remember that it was a “whole grain bread”. You ask for it, and the friendly baker instantly knows that you’d like to get the “Christoph whole grain bread with pumpkin seeds”.

That’s exactly how the API works:

You ask for the vehicle with license plate number “ABC-123” (like you have it in your inhouse IT system) and the system will give you “ABC 123 Henry” as a result, as that’s how it’s represented in Visibility Hub because of how the carrier maintained it in its GPS provider’s portal. Same goes for transport identification: Say the identifier that you got from your customer on order retrieval is “ord-012345” and that’s how you have it stored in your in-house IT system. Now you don’t know exactly in which field this identifier is present in the Visibility Hub system, and you also don’t know if the notation is identical. But you ask for it, and as a result you’ll get the correct transport, even if the identifier known to Visibility Hub is “ord012345-001-v2”.

Now you have the correct license plate and the correct transports identifier and your system sends this allocation information to the Visibility Hub system. Automated and in the background by machine-to-machine communication. In the same step where you dispatch the order internally. The result? Real-time visibility and happy customers.

Learn more about these enhancements and the API in general by looking at the Visibility Hub Developer Portal, which features a usage guide and the technical specifications.

If you have further questions or you want to get started using the API, contact our support team.