Safefood 360° opens a portal for software developers

We are extremely pleased to be the first company in our industry to open a public developer portal. This means that any software vendor can now start developing software products that communicate with the Safefood 360° food safety management system or provide integration opportunities between Safefood 360° and another platform such as SAP, Microsoft NAV or Oracle Fusion.

The new portal is found at https://developers.safefood360.com/

What is an API?

API stands for “application programmable interface” and it sounds a bit technical at first but in reality it is a very simple concept. An API is a secure piece of our software platform that other systems can connect to in order to push and pull information from the Safefood 360° food safety management system. You could imagine that an API is a kind of special language that two systems use to talk to each other.

Endless opportunities

The development of the API opens endless opportunities for innovation:

• ERP integrations
• Mobile apps for monitoring, cleaning, auditing and more
• Offline capabilities

API Reference

Our API is still under development and it is planned to be released by mid-June 2015. At this time the API will span many of the key modules throughout the software.

Why make it public?

Unlike any other system available in the food safety management area we are the first company to make our API publicly accessible. Several companies do offer integration with systems such as SAP or Microsoft NAV and most companies even maintain an API but the API reference is kept away from the public eye.

We however think that having a public API will improve both the quality of the API and create more opportunities to develop business models around Safefood 360°.

The majority of internet actually runs on public code – the Apache servers that sent you this web page are based on fully open source code, so is the content management system that we use to publish this blog. When everyone can see the code it means that more eyes have the opportunity to spot weaknesses and suggest improvements. We think the same will apply to our API. Working together with a wide variety of developers we will get the best results for us, the developers and above all our users.

With a public API several software companies can develop their own mobile apps for example, creating a new marketplace for innovations. We are really looking forward to what the future holds in store for our API and the Safefood 360° platform.