Note: This article was published on May 18th, 2021. The information presented throughout this page may have changed since its publication.
Automation can be a complex endeavor for any business. A common question we hear all the time is: where to begin?
Over the years, we have helped thousands of companies start their automation journey from scratch. That means building new recipes from a blank canvas and growing the automation footprint over time. Relative to average tools, this all happens with amazing speed.
But we are never satisfied to rest on our laurels, so over the years we have worked to empower users to work even faster by leveraging pre-packaged automations. That has led to amazing things like the Workato community and recipe collections which have powered thousands of automations over the years. With thousands of recipes in our community library, we are thrilled to empower automators from all over the world with the wisdom of the crowds.
Crowd-sourcing, or drawing on the wisdom of others for best practices is just an all-around good idea. Research shows it is a smart way to implement strategy and improve decision making accuracy for better outcomes. It’s also faster to begin where someone left off rather than starting anew. In the keynote for Automate 2021, CEO Vijay Tella describes why it is crucial for businesses to be “completely inspired” to remain competitive in the coming years.
The opportunity: room for more
When we look at automation work that our customers do, we are reminded of Lego toys. Whether a child (or an AFOL – adult fan of Lego :D) builds a rocket ship or a house, the fundamental building blocks are the same.
We have watched this pattern play out in automation with Recipes over and over again. Even across industries and use cases, many businesses end up using many of the same fundamental approaches to solve different problems. Recipes are so powerful that they can easily be applied to many different challenges with only minor adjustments.
We visualize it like this:
As I have supported customers across industries, it became clear that it was time to take pre-packaged automation solutions to the next level.
Introducing Accelerators
During Automate 2021, I am thrilled to announce Workato Automation Accelerators. These Accelerators will support organizations with pre-packaged, common workflows with best practice logic and construction, while still providing businesses the ability to customize and configure them to meet their unique needs. To begin, we are introducing six Accelerators, but have plans for many more to follow. Each Accelerator includes a variety of components – they could be SDKs, recipes, and instructional guides on how to use these solutions.
Why should you be excited about these Accelerators? They offer several key benefits:
- Best practices: We’ve harnessed the best solutions based on the data so you can leverage best practices from day one for each automation.
- Automate faster: It’s faster to go from 40 to 60 rather than 0 to 60. With a jump start for 80% of the solution, you’ll get to the finish line faster. You’ll spend less time “figuring out” and more time improving.
- Solve multiple use-cases: When we said it works like a Lego, we weren’t lying. As you’ll see, these accelerators aren’t just designed for one problem, they often can be used for multiple use-cases across your lines of business.
So you’re sold on the idea, let’s take a look at what the first class of accelerators contains:
Autonomous Operations Framework
This is our standard framework for error handling, recovery, logging, and more. With this foundation, you can set up automated retries for recipes if something goes wrong. It easily applies to any given Workato recipe as an error handler, and with simple configurations you can set up who should be notified and when, as well as where the incident should be logged, whether it be Splunk, Zendesk, or any other platform you may be using.
Campaign Launchpad
If you use Marketo, you can now kick off any campaign in minutes rather than hours and avoid complex data entry. With a simple series of dropdown menus, you can quickly clone pre-existing campaigns and have a new iteration up and running with just a few clicks. This saves marketing operations tons of time that can be applied to testing and optimizing campaigns rather than on the busywork that traditionally gets in the way.
Enterprise Data Hub
A standard way to manage frequently used records, whether that be employee data, customer data, product data and more. Cleanse, manage, and view any given record in a single place. This consolidates, cleanses, validates, audits the records so you can distribute them downstream to everything else.
Intelligent Invoice Processing
Coming soon! In this process, accounts payable is a common hang up for companies. And the AP team is flooded with email documents with a ton of manual data entry with lots of errors and more. This allows you to use Workato to automatically process PDF invoices, extract data, and create records in downstream systems, like SAP or Netsuite.
ELT pipeline for Snowflake
Coming soon! For this accelerator, many companies are leveraging Snowflake for cloud-based data storage. This empowers you to ingest data from on prem apps, SaaS apps, or files and databases with a single orchestration platform. Setting up this ELT pipeline becomes an easy few clicks rather than a monthslong process. Scalability becomes that much easier when you have less busywork to make changes.
Approvals Bot for Slack & Teams
Coming soon! This will take any approval workflow for getting access to any given tool and abstracts it into Slack & Teams – less context shifting for managers, less complex requests and emails from team members, especially new hires!
This is just the beginning
While today we are announcing six Accelerators, over time we will be building a full library covering platform level accelerators, accelerators for specific business areas, and even industry specific use-cases. To make sure these Accelerators are the highest value, we will be gathering ideas from customers and partners as well as industry trends.
We’d love to hear from you! Please reach out to our team with your ideas and feedback on Automation Accelerators at accelerators.feedback@workato.com
