Streamline Your Workflow Orchestration with Designer Cloud's Plans Feature

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Managing processes and workflows, whether in finance, operations, or other areas, can often feel overwhelming. But what if there was a way to automate and orchestrate your most time-consuming tasks with ease?

Enter AAC Plans—a powerful feature designed to streamline your tasks (i.e., workflows, sending emails to inform about plans execution, Post Message in Slack notifications, HTTP (API Calls), Workflow orchestration), helping you focus on what really matters while your processes run seamlessly in the background. Here's how Plans can transform the way you manage workflows across multiple domains.

Workflow Automation and Orchestration, Simplified

At its core, Plans allows you to define and automate complex tasks from start to finish. Instead of managing each task manually, you can set up a flow that integrates multiple steps across various datasets, automates reports, and triggers alerts—all based on predefined conditions.

With Plans, you can:

• Automate data ingestion from multiple sources, ensuring your workflows always start with the most accurate and up-to-date information.
• Orchestrate multi-step processes without manual intervention. Whether you’re merging financial data, generating reports, or analyzing results, Plans ensures each step flows smoothly into the next.
• Receive timely alerts when key thresholds are met, so you can make informed decisions without needing to constantly monitor the system.

Use Case: Personal Finance Management with Designer Cloud | Part 1

Managing your finances doesn't have to be a complex, time-consuming task. With so much on your plate, keeping track of your monthly expenses and refining your budget can often feel overwhelming. But what if there was a way to make it easier? 

Designer Cloud orchestration is a revolutionary solution designed to streamline and automate your financial processes. Here’s how a simple Plan comprised of two workflows can help you effortlessly manage your expenses and master your budget.

Step 1: Expense Tracking

With Designer Cloud, you can automatically pull in all your financial data and categorize every expense—whether it’s groceries, utilities, or entertainment—so you get a crystal-clear overview of where your money is going. 

Once you have a clear snapshot of your monthly expenses, you can seamlessly merge this data with your budget to get an accurate view of your financial health. Designer Cloud even lets you generate monthly reports to track your progress, complete with automated alerts to notify you when you’re overspending in any category. No more manual updates, no more errors—just smarter financial management.

The first workflow reads your monthly CSV bank statement file and then prepares and aggregates the data.

The second workflow uses that data and combines it with the monthly budget to create a monthly report.

These two workflows have been intentionally separated to illustrate how Plans can orchestrate different tasks such as workflows (also, stay tuned for the second part of this blog later this year).

Step 2: Automate and Orchestrate Your Financial Processes

Once your financial report is created, it’s time to take things a step further with Designer Cloud’s Plans feature. Imagine having your financial processes run on autopilot—automating everything from data ingestion to report generation. That’s the power of Plans.

Plans allows you to automate the entire workflow, meaning you’ll receive detailed reports of your spending and get notified of any budget overages—without lifting a finger. By orchestrating your financial processes, you save time, eliminate manual recalculations, and make informed financial decisions with ease. 

This plan above orchestrates 2 tasks. In this case, the tasks are the workflows we created to track our expenses and to create the monthly report described above.

While the personal finance example highlights how you can automate budgeting and expense tracking, the flexibility of Plans allows you to scale and apply it across various industries and functions. Think of Plans as a universal task manager solution that can orchestrate any process involving multiple steps or datasets.

From financial reporting and marketing campaign management to operational processes and business intelligence workflows, the possibilities are endless. Set it up once, and let the automation take over.

Why Use Plans?

With Plans, the benefits are clear:

• Reduce manual work: Free up your time by automating repetitive tasks that eat into your day.
• Eliminate errors: Ensure consistency by automating the orchestration of your workflows.
• Improve decision-making: Gain better insights by receiving real-time updates and comprehensive reports when they matter most.

In short, Designer Cloud’s Plans is not just a tool for one specific scenario: it’s an essential part of your orchestration and automation strategy, providing flexibility and across all your processes.

Additional use cases to consider:

• Orchestration in sequence: Imagine that a process needs to be triggered depending on the result (success/failure or always) of a previous step.
• Notifications: Use Plans to communicate with members in your organization (email or Slack messages) when the process that tracks KPIs crosses a defined threshold value to alert and act.