Reasons to Automate - Reducing Duplication of Tasks

Question

(view in My Videos)Maximizing both productivity and personal balance can be a tricky situation, particularly in situations where someone may leave an organization or be away for an extended period of time.  By utilizing the option to schedule workflows in Server, the duplication of work becomes a much less prevalent issue due to scheduling and last minute requests.

Have you removed any roadblocks of manually figuring out someone else's work while they were out or removing duplication of tasks through automation?

mbarone · Answer

One thing we do a lot of with automation is checking a "trigger" and if the trigger has been pulled, then launch a series of workflows.  For example, say users in a department that work in SQL Server instead of Alteryx (for various reasons) have a table that loads customer information all throughout the day.  We can have them create a SQL table with just one cell, say, "Trigger" and when their customer table loads, it can set the trigger to 1.  We can have a "bot" module check that field every 10 minutes and if it's 1, then through the Events tab we can launch various other modules (can use a test tool to error the module or not), as well as set the trigger back to 0 so we don't run the same modules on the same data in 10 minutes.  Only new data will flip the 0 to a 1.

One of many use cases where Automation can make our lives more efficient!