Automating a business workflow#

Remember our friend Nathan?

Nathan 🙋: Hello, it's me again. My manager was so impressed with my first workflow automation solution that she entrusted me with more responsibility.
You 👩‍🔧: More work and responsibility. Congratulations, I guess. What do you need to do now?
Nathan 🙋: I got access to all our sales data and I'm now responsible for creating two reports: one for regional sales and one for orders prices. They're based on data from different sources and come in different formats.
You 👩‍🔧: Sounds like a lot of manual work, but the kind that can be automated. Let's do it!

Workflow design#

Now that we know what Nathan wants to automate, let's list the steps he needs to take to achieve this:

1. Get and combine data from all necessary sources.
2. Sort the data and format the dates.
3. Write binary files.
4. Send notifications using email and Discord.

SMS-iT Workflow provides core nodes for all these steps. This use case is somewhat complex. We should build it from three separate workflows:

1. A workflow that merges the company data with external information.
2. A workflow that generates the reports.
3. A workflow that monitors errors in the second workflow.

Workflow prerequisites#

To build the workflows, you will need the following:

• An Airtable account and credentials.
• A Google account and credentials to access Gmail.
• A Discord account and webhook URL (you receive this using email when you sign up for this course).

Next, you will build these three workflows with step-by-step instructions.