Workflow Automation

Beyond Zapier: When You Need Custom Automation

Zapier and Make are excellent for simple automations — when a form is submitted, create a row in a spreadsheet and send an email. But they hit limits fast: conditional branching gets complex, error handling is limited, multi-step workflows become brittle, and costs escalate quickly when you need thousands of tasks per month.

Custom automation makes sense when: your workflows have complex conditional logic, you need reliable error handling and retry mechanisms, you process high volumes (thousands of events per day), you need to transform data in ways that Zapier steps cannot handle, or you need audit trails and compliance-grade logging.

We build these automations as serverless functions, background job processors, or dedicated microservices — whichever architecture fits the specific workflow and volume requirements.

Our Automation Architecture

We build automations on a foundation of event-driven architecture. When something happens in your business (a new order, a form submission, an approval), it triggers an event. That event flows through a processing pipeline that executes the appropriate steps — data transformation, system updates, notifications, document generation — with proper error handling at each stage.

For reliability, we use message queues (BullMQ with Redis, or AWS SQS) to ensure events are not lost even if a processing step fails. Failed steps are retried with exponential backoff, and persistent failures are routed to a dead letter queue with alerts so your team can investigate.

Every automation includes monitoring: execution counts, failure rates, processing latency, and business-level metrics (e.g., how many invoices were generated today). You always know the automation is running correctly — and you find out immediately if it is not.

Common Automations and Measuring ROI

Order processing: New orders automatically trigger inventory checks, payment processing, shipping label generation, customer notifications, and accounting entries — an end-to-end workflow that previously required a person touching five different systems. Employee onboarding: New hire triggers account creation in all systems (email, Slack, project tools, HR software), generates onboarding documents, assigns training tasks, and notifies their manager — what used to take IT two hours now happens in two minutes.

We help you measure the actual impact of automation before and after. Typical results: 80-95% reduction in manual time, near-zero error rate on automated steps, and faster end-to-end process completion. For a process that took one person two hours daily, automation saves roughly $25,000 per year in labor costs alone.