If This Then That
Samuel Dorven |
11 janvier, 2023 |
If This Then That
👋Hello everyone and welcome to our new subscribers,
We're delighted to welcome you to the thirteenth edition of the SmartMyData newsletter. Every 15 days, we'll be bringing you the latest news from the world of automation and RPA.
This week, we focus on workflows. Happy reading!
🌎 The principle of automated workflows
An automated workflow is a sequence of steps designed to automate a process. An example below:
This simple automated workflow was created by IFTTT (which stands for IF THIS THEN THAT). It allows you to receive a daily morning reminder of your first meeting.
When it comes to workflow, triggering is one of the key concepts. And IF THIS THEN THAT helps us understand what a trigger is: a trigger is one (or a series) of specific conditions that will trigger an action.
Triggers can be configured to occur at a specific time (every day at 7 a.m., as in the IFTTT example), or when certain data or updates are received, or when certain actions are performed, such as sending a form, receiving an e-mail or completing a task.
In real-life process automation, it often happens that conditions only concern a specific set of users, and that there is often a main rule followed by numerous small exceptions (e.g.: IF the person's course of study takes 2 years instead of the usual 3, THEN send him or her this document in addition to the main document). The main branch of the workflow is then broken down into sub-workflows, and this type of automation is akin to classic IT development logic. We believe that this type of complex process automation sets the Smartmydata platform apart from its competitors, where it is sometimes complicated to manage these notions of exception.
If you'd like to find out more about triggers and workflows, we've written a full article about them on our blog!
SMD article on workflows/triggers
💡 Case studies in e-commerce automation
In the linked article, Alister Esam shows us how automation workflows can benefit e-commerce companies and provides ideas for implementing it in their business processes.
And at SmartMyData, we can help you implement the 8 scenarios proposed within your organization ;)
8 Workflow Automation Ideas For Ecommerce Business Processes | CustomerThink
❤️ N8N, interconnection with a wide range of applications
N8n is an open-source automation tool low-code which lets you create workflows to automate various tasks.
Some of its features are similar to modules found on the SmartMyData platform, notably the step-by-step scenario creation studio. But n8n can interact with over 200 applications (Dropbox, Google Drive, Slack, Trello...), and that's the main reason why we use it with our platform. Even though we have a number of connectors, we consider that managing the maintenance of 200 connectors is a mission in itself, and n8n does it very well :)
We have therefore created a generic scenario, which can be duplicated in n8n to use a SmartMyData scenario within this application. The use cases are mainly data cleansing and consolidation within the SMD platform, with input and output connectors not available on our platform.
Here's a video from Shubham Sharma which shows you the power of n8n.
Become OVERWHELMING with n8n
n8n: an open source workflow automation tool
📣 A quote to slip into an automation dinner
"The automation of society will represent a huge increase in productivity and wealth for the human race, because it will free us from all the drudgery and repetitive work we don't want to do." - Elon Musk