Introducing the Developer Hub + 2023 API Enhancements

Whether you prefer Digital Transformation, Industry 4.0, Smart Manufacturing, or Plant Digitization, these concepts are all about driving interconnectivity between plant technologies in order to increase operational visibility and control.

As we look ahead into 2023 and the future of SafetyChain, we are excited to share our plans for new API enhancements and tools that will help accelerate and extend your own plant digitization journey.

Because the New Year is a time for both reflection and anticipation, let's first look at what SafetyChain customers are currently able to accomplish using our APIs and then we’ll dive into a few of the major improvements that are coming your way.

What can SafetyChain APIs do today?

Simply put, our APIs allow you to easily connect SafetyChain with other systems and enhance data from multiple sources across your organization. Here are a few real-life examples of how SafetyChain’s APIs can be used in manufacturing facility:

• Create new business process workflows across multiple applications using Process APIs. 

  • EXAMPLE: Onboard a new employee through your HR system and automatically trigger a user and access provisioning in SafetyChain.

• Enable collaboration across your organization with System-to-System integrations.

  • EXAMPLE: Update a product specification within your ERP system and trigger an update to a form definition in SafetyChain.

• Use SafetyChain web services to develop your own custom applications.

  • EXAMPLE: Create a custom project management tool that automatically pulls a full list of active SafetyChain users in order to properly evaluate the available resources for a new project.

• Conduct in-depth, centralized data analysis by integrating SafetyChain and other applications  with Business Intelligence (BI) tools and External Data Warehouses.

  • EXAMPLE: Prior to replacing existing suppliers with new ones, pull existing supplier data from SafetyChain and market information on potential suppliers – such as geographic factors, industry reputation, and other RFP data – into a BI tool to conduct a thorough risk analysis.

Introducing the SafetyChain Developer Hub

The examples above are just scratching the surface of what is possible using SafetyChain’s APIs. But we know it’s not always easy to complete those integrations on your own.

This is why we are thrilled to announce the availability of our brand new SafetyChain Developer Hub!

Our goal is to provide you with a new developer experience that will save time planning, building and deploying new SafetyChain integrations and custom applications that will extend the SafetyChain platform in countless ways.

Moving forward, you can easily access all of the documentation at your fingertips right from the Developer Hub (but don’t worry, you can always reach out to Customer Support if you have questions).

Here’s an overview of how this resource works:

1. Use the API Reference to view all available SafetyChain endpoints and how they are used.

2. Review all example requests and responses for each endpoint with all required parameters.

3. Download and use OpenAPI Specs with your favorite API clients and tools.

4. Generate code snippets for each endpoint selecting your favorite language.

5. Review use cases and example integrations to help developers of all levels including low/no code tools.

Looking Forward: Security & Usage Improvements

But we’re not stopping there. We are investing significantly in our API offerings and, over the course of 2023, will be releasing additional enhancements that will improve the usability, performance and security of your integrations. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s to come:

• Self-service API governance with user management for both machine and physical users allowing your organization full monitoring to your integration users.

• Self-service authorization policies with granular access controls allowing full control of when and what your integration users have access to.

• Simplified REST-like endpoints for all core SafetyChain functionality allowing full extensibility to the entire SafetyChain platform. 

We hope you are as excited as we are about these API enhancements. Our team can’t wait to support you on your continuing plant digitization efforts in 2023!