A lot of businesses either use automation or are interested in adopting it. There’s a very good reason for that: business automation is extremely valuable. It reduces human error and helps businesses grow while keeping costs low.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Automation offers a lot of advantages, some obvious and easy to understand and others more subtle. For example, automation can help improve team communication, formulate and enforce business processes, preserve business knowledge, make business tools and infrastructure more consistent and reliable, and more.
In a general sense, automation is a very simple thing: cause some process to run on a schedule or in response to an important event, such as a new order, an incoming email, or maybe a monitor alert. Usually automations connect two systems, such as your ecommerce website and invoicing service, or your email inbox and task management tool, or a monitoring service and your mobile device.
Some businesses, especially larger and/or hi-tech companies, often automate their processes by writing code. But that’s too complicated or expensive for most small businesses, even before calculating the cost of maintaining the code over time, such as handling issues that might arise and keeping the code up-to-date.
Fortunately, there are numerous integration platforms that help us create and manage automations with little or no code, making automation feasible and even readily available for everybody. Most businesses are familiar with Zapier, the market leader that popularized integration platforms, but there are also quite a few other integration platforms out there, with different pricing schemes and different advantages and disadvantages.
We support quite a few integration platforms and can usually also support additional platforms and APIs.