Creating a basic integration for SHI assets

Let Oomnitza be your single source of truth!

With Oomnitza you get complete visibility of SHI (Software House International) asset information as asset data is automatically transformed into consumable information and actionable insights.

Connect Oomnitza + SHI in minutes

Get the information and insights that you need to reduce costs and the time that you spend on administration tasks such as:

• Configurable dashboards and list views of key asset information
• Configurable workflows that you can create:
• For tracking assets from purchase to allocation to decommissioning
• For stock taking       
• For identifying lost, stolen, and unassigned assets
• For assigning assets and reclaiming assets when you onboard and offboard employees
• Configurable reports to share information about users with your colleagues and management

Let's get started

As a Preferred Distributor Partner, SHI offers an integration to create Assets in Oomnitza with information such as Model, Manufacturer, Serial Number, Purchase Date, and PO Number directly into Oomnitza when the product is ordered.

This integration is built and hosted by SHI. For further details please see below. For any questions, or to request an integration, please contact your SHI representative and ask about the Oomnitza EDI integration. 

NOTE: The SHI integration is designed for the creation of new hardware assets. Software, services, and non-serialized accessories are not supported at this point in time. Also right now we only support the creation of new assets, not the updating of already existing assets. Basically this API gets invoked when a new asset leaves the shipping warehouse on the SHI side and gets sent to a recipient.

For more information on SHI, visit shi.com.

Available Fields:

SHI is able to provide the below list of fields through their integration. These fields are optional on the Oomnitza side and can be configured to meet your business needs. This means that if a field with the given name exists inside Oomnitza it will be mapped, otherwise the information will be dropped.

barcode
device_name
notes
po_number
purchase_date
purchase_price
serial_number
shi_asset_type
shi_class
shi_commodity
shi_maintenance_end
shi_maintenance_start
shi_manu_part_number
shi_manufacturer
shi_operating_system
shi_qty_invoiced
shi_sales_order_number
shi_ship_address1
shi_ship_address2
shi_ship_address3
shi_ship_city
shi_ship_country
shi_ship_date
shi_ship_name
shi_ship_postalcode
shi_ship_state
shi_tracking_info

To bring these fields into Oomnitza from SHI, corresponding fields with the exact Oomnitza External ID (technical field name) must be created in Oomnitza. To create the fields, click Configuration > Data Model > Field Configuration. By default the asset fields  are displayed. Click Add and name the field after the described field listed above. 

NOTE: Fields can either be entered verbatim from the list above, or entered with spaces (as seen in "Serial Number" below, and the external ID will be generated with the appropriate underscores. Please also note that if an external ID already exists in Oomnitza, subsequently created fields with the same name will be given the id "<external_id>_1" where <external_id> is the name of the field. 

You can confirm the field's external ID for the field by clicking the custom field in Configuration > Data Model > Field Configuration. The value is displayed in the External ID field.

Common Workflows

For common fields coming from SHI, the IDs above match directly with default fields in Oomnitza. Examples of this include Serial Number, Barcode, Model, and Asset Type. Other fields that may have significant differences have "shi_" added to the beginning. Some of these fields, particularly Manufacturer, may need to be transformed in order to map to the proper field in Oomnitza. This should be achieved using Workflows within Oomnitza on new asset creations. 

An example of this would be converting SHI Manufacturer values to Oomnitza Manufacturer values:

In the above example, we begin on creation of a New asset which has SHI information filled in (this is to avoid this workflow getting triggered upon other assets being created), then use Conditional Threshold Blocks to check for the presence of a given manufacturer in the information coming from SHI. For example, here's the Dell Conditional Threshold Block:

And the corresponding Update Block:

These blocks can be chained to support any number of manufacturers.

Filtering

Within the Oomnitza workflow, using a daisy-chain of Conditional Threshold Blocks will allow you to filter out the assets that you would like to keep within Oomnitza and eventually archive the ones that are not wanted (or needed) for tracking purposes.  For example, Oomnitza's "Archive" Workflow block can be used to automatically archive unwanted objects at the end of such a mentioned daisy-chain, and logic like the workflow shown above can be used to transfer and transform data among fields in Oomnitza.

What SHI needs from you:

To configure the integration in Oomnitza, SHI requires a few key pieces of information to get it set up.

1. Oomnitza Endpoint URL (e.g. shi.oomnitza.com)
2. Client API token (See Below)

Steps below take place after customers work with Oomnitza to create an environment for that customer's company.

Acquiring a Token: 

To generate an API token in Oomnitza, complete these steps:

1. Click Configuration > Security > API tokens.
2. Click + to add a new token.
3. Enter the name of the token.
4. Enter the name of the user to whom the token will be assigned.
5. Click SUBMIT. 

The API token is displayed once and cannot be recovered.

For further information, refer to Creating an API token

This will only be displayed once, and cannot be recovered if lost, so make sure to store it somewhere secure:

For external services, we recommend creating a new User that is specific to that service. Once created, you can log in as that user and generate an API token associated with that account. This makes the activity of the API token easier to identify and control, and prevents issues as your team members change.