Planning your Data Flow

With a better understanding of ItemPath and Power Pick, you can now understand how the process works — in a typical Data Pull integration, your enterprise resource planning (ERP) system will be where users create requests for warehouse workers to complete various kinds of tasks (picking materials, putting materials, counting materials, etc.). Some criteria will be used to filter for only parts that are stored in your VLM system. Then you direct ItemPath to use those filters to retrieve only applicable orders.

Once those tasks have been created in Power Pick (as orders and order lines), ItemPath can send a confirmation back to your ERP. In Power Pick, the order lines can be acted on, or "touched". This will create a transaction record in Power Pick. If, after the order line is completed, the stock level is updated other than the requested amount, a Context Correction transaction will also be created. ItemPath's Data Push app will check for transactions and return those as responses to your ERP - making sure that your ERP has access to exactly what's going on inside of Power Pick!

We've visualized this as a diagram:

Note: ItemPath can be integrated with a range of services, including directly with certain kinds of databases. For more information about database integrations, consult with our documentation or reach out to our support or sales team! For the purposes of this course, we will primarily be working with an ERP connection.

What do you need to begin?

This means the following things need to in place before you begin your integration:

A plan for producing data (order and material information) that needs to be passed to ItemPath and Power Pick.
Understanding how your ERP works to send and receive information. This means knowing the API endpoints and authentication requirements to interact with the ERP, as well as performing any necessary set-up steps.
If you would like to receive data from ItemPath (transactions, confirmations, etc.) a plan for how that data will be entered and used. In particular, how can your ERP receive and use the confirmation data?

What this will look like will vary from integration to integration! Coming to ItemPath with a good understanding of your business goals and the corresponding data structures in your ERP is a key factor for success in an integration project.