In August 2024 Central Dispatch has released new APIs for third party integrations with the Central Dispatch platform. The BATS team has been working with Central Dispatch teams to update the connectivity between the two systems by utilizing these new technologies and to move away from legacy integrations. 

The BATS team continues to implement new API features as they become available from Central Dispatch. As of November 1, 2024 we have implemented the following integrations:

Those integrations have been in place for some time and are working smoothly.

There are a few changes that come with these new API integrations that BATS users must be aware of.  These changes primarily relate to how the authentication between the two systems work.

Most of you have already experienced this new authentication process which requires you to click on a "Link CD Account" button in BATS and log in with your Central Dispatch credentials to authorize the connection. You may have also noticed that occasionally you will receive an email from BATS instructing you to authorize the connection again in order to continue processing transactions between your BATS account and your Central Dispatch account. There are few reasons why that happens:

Now that Central Dispatch has the multi-user capability, you must ensure that the login information that you are using to authorize the connection between BATS and Central Dispatch is one of the Admin or Owner accounts in Central Dispatch. 

That is required in order for BATS to have the necessary permissions to post loads and dispatch loads on your behalf. If you receive an email from BATS telling you that it was not able to post or dispatch due to user permissions, you will have to click on the "Link CD Account" button and authorize the connection using the login with correct permissions.

As of November 1, 2024, Central Dispatch has instituted a policy that requires every user to use Two-Factor Authentication when logging into their website.  This means that the BATS Support Team will no longer be able to log into your Central Dispatch when providing troubleshooting assistance. Additionally, BATS will remove the Central Dispatch user name and password fields from System Settings as these are no longer used for integration between the two systems.  

The new API integration brings a more robust and faster integration between the two systems, but with it comes additional data validations. In other words, there are stricter validations on what data can be entered in which fields. For example, the origin or delivery contact email field will only accept a valid email address, and will accept only one address in the field. If data validation fails, then Central Dispatch will reject the transaction. In those cases, BATS will send you an email which will include any error messages that were received from CD that will instruct you on how to fix the problem and then retry the action. 
Here are few other common issues that may be encountered:

There are exciting new integration options coming in the near future, such as load tracking, that we will integrate with as soon as Central Dispatch makes them available to us. We will update this KB Article, and will inform you via email, as those become available.