What is an Integration?

ItemPath is software that helps you interact with data in your Power Pick system. You can use Reports and Dashboards to gain insights into how materials are stored in your warehouses and VLMs. ItemPath also serves as an interface for other kinds of software to interact with Power Pick.

If you need to create orders in Power Pick you can use an integration. ItemPath excels at this kind of task. Integrations can also create confirmations or adjustments in your enterprise resource planning system (ERP) or create new Materials in Power Pick. We built ItemPath to help with exactly this kind of task. Integrations can also create confirmations or adjustments in your ERP or create new Materials in Power Pick.

There's a wide range of possibilities!

We created this course to explain the process for planning and building an integration from start to finish.

An API for Power Pick

ItemPath offers a REST application programming interface (API) for your Kardex Power PIck system. Think of an API as a means for software systems to communicate directly with other software systems. It's very likely your ERP has its own API. These APIs allow programs to make requests to create, retrieve, update or delete data (depending on configuration).

Your ERP system likely has the ability to initiate requests and exchange data with the APIs of other software systems. This kind of connection is what we would call a direct API integration. If you are looking to build this type of integration, you can find more resources about ItemPath's API in our documentation and courses.

Some systems might lack this ability, in which case you would use middleware. Software that allows you to make requests to APIs. To help facilitate building connections between systems, ItemPath includes three applications (available as add-ons) that eliminate the need for for working with your own middleware:

Data Pull: Imports orders and materials from an external source and creates them in Power Pick
Data Push: Exports transaction confirmations from Power Pick to the connected software.
Variance: Imports a table of data for joining with Power Pick data available in ItemPath.

The basic architecture of an integration will look like the following:

Connections and Integrations

When planning an integration project you will need to create two things:

Connection: The information and means of communicating with the system that you'll be integrating with ItemPath.
Integration(s): The tasks that you want to complete using a connection. You can have multiple integrations for each connection.

This course is designed to help guide you through the process of coming up with clear plans for building an integration.

This will involve:

Coming up with clear goals and knowing which tools to use.
Gathering basic information to complete the project.
Identifying team members and staff

You may have some ideas already, but sketching out some thoughts at this point will be helpful. The next page will cover some basic information you should bring together when starting out on this project!