Manufacturers today lose time, accuracy and decision confidence due to the lack of synchronization across several systems. Customer and supplier orders are being managed in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, products and bill of materials in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and live production data tracking in the Manufacturing Execution System (MES), while global business metrics are compiled and analyzed in a Business Intelligence (BI) tool.
To keep data up to date across different systems, manufacturers find themselves managing multiple data sources and exporting and importing data, potentially causing mistakes, duplicated entries and outdated data. Automating these tasks not only save working hours but also ensure all the information is accurate and up to date.
With its customers experience in mind, we are excited to announce that Fusion Operations has released a new API version, currently available in Public Beta on Autodesk Platform Services (APS). This release is intended for customers and partners who want early access, begin planning their migration, and provide feedback ahead of General Availability.
Whether retrieving data from external systems – such as production orders, products and bills of materials, or send data to external systems – such as production status, quality or worker clocking times – all this can be done in the new API version.
What are the changes in this new API version?
Compared to previous existing API versions, the main enhancements now available are:
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New endpoints to manage Punch Clock records, Downtime records, Machines, Operations, and Workers
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Easier entity updates via PATCH method
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Changes in the authentication workflow, which has been replaced by the token system used by Autodesk APIs
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Several new fields available, as well as more options to filter your requests
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Restructuring of error payloads and standardization of fields to camelCase
What sample integration workflows exist today, and what do they sync?
Though the usage of Fusion Operations API is not constrained to the workflows below, you can find its most common use cases.
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
These integrations prevent users from exporting the ERP data to Fusion Operations, allowing workers to quickly start collecting production. They also ensure production data is sent back to the ERP system.- From ERP to Fusion Operations: Production Orders, and Products (along with their Bills of Materials, Operations, and Files). On fewer occasions: Sales Orders and Purchase Orders
- From Fusion Operations to ERP: Production Records and Inventory Movements
- Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
These integrations ensure product data is up to date (such as Bills of Materials, Operations, and Documentation), avoiding errors and manual validation of data. If any production issues occur, these connections may report them back to the PLM.- From PLM to Fusion Operations: Products (along with their Bills of Materials, Operations, and Files)
- From Fusion Operations to PLM: Production Records (particularly the ones where issues occurred)
- Accounting
These integrations ensure that Sales and Purchase Orders are synchronized, along with their Products. The shipping and receiving statuses are also synchronized to generate invoices and bills. The Inventory and Punch Clock records may as well be synchronized from Fusion Operations.- From Accounting to Fusion Operations: Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, and Products
- From Fusion Operations to Accounting: Shipping and Receiving Inventory Movements, Inventory, Punch Clock Records
- Marketplaces
These integrations often send Sales Orders and Products to Fusion Operations. Then, as those orders are shipped, the shipping status and Inventory are synched back to the marketplace.- From Marketplace to Fusion Operations: Sales Orders and Products
- From Operations to Marketplace: Shipping Inventory Movements and Inventory
- Machine Connectivity
These integrations often sync the status of each machine to Fusion Operation to avoid workers from manually updating the machine status and the values it records over time.- From Machine Software to Fusion Operations: Machine status and telemetry
- From Machine Software to Fusion Operations: Machine status and telemetry
- Business Intelligence (BI)
These integrations pull a variety of data from Fusion Operations to build dashboards for a visual and detailed analysis.- From Fusion Operations to BI Software: Any entity, with primary focus on Production Records, Production Orders and Inventory
What’s next?
As this version, currently in Public Beta, is validated and improved based on community feedback, we will be working on the final General Availability (GA) release.
Once GA is released, all previous API versions will enter sunset mode. New features and enhancements will be exclusive to the latest API version, while all previous ones will undergo a phased rate limit reductions ahead of a scheduled shutdown. To ensure a smooth transition from the legacy versions to the new one a migration guidance has been prepared in this link, and sufficient time will be provided before previous version retirement.
Start looking today at your migration to this improved version and take full advantage of Fusion Operations latest improvements!
Getting Started
Explore now:
Give feedback:
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Submit ideas on our Ideas Board
Let us know what you build! As always, feedback is welcome; it directly helps shape what we work on next (GA release)!