Application Integration

How API Management for couriers is utilized in Asia

How API Management for couriers is utilized in Asia

SF-Express is a large Chinese courier company who has established a huge collection of information, market development, logistics and distribution, express delivery and other business institutions and service networks. Since its start in 1993, SF-Express has always focused on improving the quality of service, while constantly meeting market demand in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. That is where API Management for couriers comes in.

After more than 10 years in development, SF-Express now has over 60,000 employees, more than 4,000-owned operating vehicles, over 30 branches, more than 2,000 self-built business outlets, service network coverage in more than 20 provinces, municipalities and Hong Kong, Taiwan and more than 100 prefecture-level cities. In recent years, the growth of online electronic sales brought about a rapid growth of the express business, but also to SF-Express’ IT system it has raised a more complex challenge. SF-Express said that “SF-Express is essentially an IT company, a Big Data company.”

The challenges

API management challenge

  • Integration with business platforms of their key accounts: Huawei, Xiaomi and other major customers, as well as JD.com, Taobao and other large platform integration capacity is very weak. Their platform needs to have a complete API Lifecycle Management and high-processing capacity.
  • Market timing: The original system development cycle is long and cannot meet the fast-changing market demand.
  • Performance bottleneck: At this time, they are unable to support the performance requirements of the electronic dealer promotional activities.

The features of the API Management for couriers platform

Using the AMPLIFY API Management solution, SF-Express has set up an API Management platform, focusing on the future that it has laid out and it encompasses the following characteristics: The High-performance Extensible Open API platform provides a rich interface for key accounts, as well as mainstream electronic business platforms, it further provides API Lifecycle Management and supports the industry’s mainstream OAuth 2.0.

  • The rapid development cycle shortens the partner onboard cycle, to a few days from the original, to a few hours or even minutes.
  • It provides unified and rich partner management to achieve end-to-end business process monitoring.
  • API Lifecycle Management, covering development, testing, deployment, security, management and monitoring.

API Management for couriers
SF-Express’ API Management platform not only can integrate with Huawei, Xiaomi and other key accounts, the mainstream of the electronic business platform, such as Taobao, Tmall, JD.com and so on, but also can integrate with large customers’ ERP platform to provide real-time order search API, logistics status feedback API, inventory information synchronization API and other services for APIs.

By providing an open API to build an ecosystem around its core business, more partners can use the platform of SF-Express to enrich the business of SF-Express.

The API Management platform for couriers built by AMPLIFY API Management has high performance and greatly improves the efficiency of business processing. In the “618,” “Double 11” and another promotional period to efficiently handle the large customer orders from the electric platforms, to meet the performance needs of promotional activities.

Conclusion

API management for courier's ecosystem
The enterprise landscape increases to encompass SaaS systems, consumer-grade file sharing, social media and other items. AMPLIFY API Management platform for couriers provides greater flexibility to achieve their business goals and manage increased volume of digital business with enterprise-grade security.

Read more about API Management here.