In our company, we heavily rely on APIs. We connect to Harvest, Expensify, Salesforce, and other systems to collect data and move the data to Qlik Sense for the creation of analysis tools and dashboards.
Unfortunately, inherited from our shareholders, our current ERP system does not expose any API. Someone has to export the data in Excel format every few days, push it to Google Drive, and let Qlik Sense make his magic.
That’s not effective at all. I have tried to get APIs from that bloody system for the last four years. No luck.
I think that technology adoption is critical for business growth.
If I can save people time daily by automating processes and data reporting, people will spend that time on business-critical actions.
Calling a client, refining a presentation, calling it a day early, and so on.
Smooth integration between systems is based on great connectors. Great connectors rely on APIs.
Every minute someone jumps from one system to another to replicate the same data is a lost minute in productivity. It’s simply dumb. You will need to authenticate to the other system and copy data from one system to the other. It is not just dumb, and it is prone to errors.
Those errors tend to propagate among other automated systems, and that’s a big issue. We are not a big company where you may have ‘slaves’ dealing with data entry. Every second of each person in the company is valuable and needs to be protected as much as possible.
This is why we need APIs. And, eventually, you need them too. No matter how big you are.