The meaning of automation has changed over the years but has always equated with making our lives easier. Before 1900, windmills and water wheels allowed us to harness natural forces to do repetitive physical work without constant human effort. During the industrial revolution, steam engines, textile looms and assembly lines allowed us to scale this automation. Then came electricity which allowed us to standardize and gave us speed. Then came computers, digital software automation, robotics and now AI driven automation. The methods have evolved but the goal has remained the same – repeat the same thing over and over with accuracy, speed and scale, all while making the lives of humans less labor intensive.
I have been working with automation for over 40 years in the areas of home automation, business process automation and personal process automation. I’ve used a ton of different tools including hosted, self-hosted and even self-written tools. Automation is a passion! Some examples are listed in the tabs at the bottom of the page.
The Long History of Automation
(and by long I mean in time, not in my description below)
I’ve worked on automation projects since he 1980’s. Radio shack had these modules that lights would plug into then could then be controlled by a remote control or a computer with software on it. It was called the X10 system and when I saw it I was addicted to automation. Everything felt so futuristic and this was actually accomplished without Wifi, ethernet networks or smart home controller – it worked by sending signals through the electrical wiring present in the house. 50 years later and this system is still available for sale. And so begins the obsession.
Today there are thousands of options with regards to automation tools. Some systems are self contained, some orchestrate between Saas apps, smart home products, phones, operating systems, security systems, sensors, physical controllers for things like water, government departments, ride share companies, you name it. The list goes on and on.
The most interesting types of ‘automators’ are apps that integrate two or more ‘things’. Those ‘things’ could be Saas apps, phones, smart home devices, the time, a webhook, a weather event, an email. String a few of those together and you get true workflows. Here are some of those apps with some examples of workflows I’ve built with them:
IFTTT
IFTTT (if this then that): this app lets you pick a this and a that and allows some action to take place of the that when some thing happens at the this. This company focuses on the consumer and has LOTS and lots of smart home items as options. Some fun integrations that I have created here include
- Flash the Phillips Hue bulbs in my house when the Uber arrives.
- Send me an SMS when someone tags me in a photo on facebook.
- When I touch an icon on my phone, create a call to my emergency contact with an SOS message.
Zapier
Zapier started out doing pretty much the same thing as IFTTT, but it was focused on business users. It allows you to specify a trigger app and an action app (or multiple action apps) to build complex workflows between 10,000 different apps. Their offerings includes several tools built by them to assist the user in building workflow including email parsers, webhooks, email, SMS and formatting tools for things like dates, which may need to be formatted slightly differently between systems.
We use Zapier heavily at my workplace and even have our app in Zapier’s list of apps. Some interesting workflows I’ve built around real world problems:
All of the above actions were automated when a user filled out a single row in a spreadsheet. The trigger was New Row in Spreadsheet and the actions were Send Private Channel Communication in Slack, New Product in Accounting Software, New Inventory Adjustment in Inventory Software and New Document in DocMerge.
New Product Workflow: This workflow accomplished the following tasks when a new product was introduced:
- Created a communication to the support teams announcing the new product and proving links to training and support documentation via Slack.
- Added the product to the accounting / inventory system.
- Created an inventory adjustment to record initial inventory.
- Wrote a press release announcing the new product.
Payroll Cost Workflow: Calculate PZapier
Zapier started out doing pretty much the same thing as IFTTT, but it was focused on business users. It allows you to specify a trigger app and an action app (or multiple action apps) to build complex workflows between 10,000 different apps. Their offerings includes several tools built by them to assist the user in building workflow including email parsers, webhooks, email, SMS and formatting tools for things like dates, which may need to be formatted slightly differently between systems.
We use Zapier heavily at my workplace and even have our app in Zapier’s list of apps. Some interesting workflows I’ve built around real world problems:
All of the above actions were automated when a user filled out a single row in a spreadsheet. The trigger was New Row in Spreadsheet and the actions were Send Private Channel Communication in Slack, New Product in Accounting Software, New Inventory Adjustment in Inventory Software and New Document in DocMerge.
New Product Workflow: This workflow accomplished the following tasks when a new product was introduced:
- Created a communication to the support teams announcing the new product and proving links to training and support documentation via Slack.
- Added the product to the accounting / inventory system.
- Created an inventory adjustment to record initial inventory.
- Wrote a press release announcing the new product.
Payroll Cost Workflow: Calculate Payroll costs for new payroll customers and update CRM / support ticket so agents and sales people could quote the cost accurately.
Make is a powerful tool that allows you to automate tasks in a similar way as Zapier but has very strong support for complex looping, error handling and data manipulation.
With this tool I have built lots of automations, for example:
Order tracking: Watch my email for order notifications and then parse out the relevant information and create a record in airtable.
Phone Number Intel / Advanced Message Taker: Another fun automation looks at voicemails that come in on the phone which are sent to email as an attachment, transcribes the conversation, and looks up advanced information on the number via Twilio’s Call Lookup API which returns detailed information about the number, including any fraud or spam reports on the number. It then logs all information to an airtable base and and sends email to me.
n8n is an open-source alternative for automation software and it’s definitely next level. It can be self-hosted or you can purchase a saas subscription.
This tool allow for integration with any app that has an API. It allows you to take input from one app (node) and run it through some custom code and pass the results on to another node. It has sophisticated conditional logic, branching and error handling. It has a beautiful interface that is intuitive. What more could you ask for?
My current project is an AI assistant that I wrote with React/node.js that will interface with n8n to get the data it needs to coordinate tasks that it has been given. It is completely voice operated and the assistant is created with an appearance and personality built by the user. I havce a self-hosted n8n instance on Railway that uses Redis, Postgres and an n8n workier. Truly fun and interesting project.
Zoho Flow integrates quite well with all of Zoho’s long list of business apps. It also includes the ability to integrate hundreds of additional apps that businesses use. We use Zoho Flow heavily at work and use it to automate workflows that span Zoho Forms, Zoho Desk, Atlassian Jira, Slack, Gmail, Zoho CRM, and many other tools. We use it to process workflows for Support, Marketing, Sales and Development.