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Why should your team adopt automation?
Automations in SmartSuite
Working with automations
Creating new automations
How your team can use automations
Smart Points
What are Automations?
Automations streamline repetitive processes, and various industries have been using them for longer than you can imagine. After the pandemic, we see an increased adoption of automation as companies reevaluate the way they do work.
An automation trigger is the “switch” that activates an automation when certain conditions are met.
Triggers include:
A record is created
Something changes in a record
A date is reached
Certain period of time has passed
Then, the automation action is the work to be done when the automation “fires.”
Actions include:
Create a record
Update specific fields in existing records
Send a SmartSuite notification to the Notification center and to members’ emails
Send an SMS message via Twilio
Send a message through Gmail
Why should you adopt automation?
Automations let you eliminate repetitive tasks from your work, offering a reliable and consistent way to streamline your processes.
SmartSuite's simple rules builder lets you easily specify when an automation is activated and exactly what it needs to do, easily automating even complex workflows.
A few benefits of implementing automations include:
Increased Efficiency
Ability to facilitate workflows
Notify the next person that action needs to be taken
Automatically change status values
Move information to an appropriate repository
Improved communication and increased transparency
Ensured accuracy of repeated tasks
Reduced need for training, manual procedures and process documentation
Automations in SmartSuite
Where to Find Automations Settings
You can open the Automations interface by clicking the Automations option located in the Solution Menu drop-down, as shown below:
Automations are configured at the Solution level, and can be triggered from events within SmartSuite (someone modifies a record's value) or an external system (a Google sheet had a new row added).
Automations can only be created by the Solution Manager or users with the Admin role. Read more about roles in this article.
If your Solution does not have any Automations configured, you will see an informational page with scrolling examples of possible automations. When you're ready just click on the Create my first Automation button to get started.
Working with automations
Automations have two components - rules that tells SmartSuite when it should kick off the Automation and one or more actions that define what should be done. Rules are listed first in the When this happens column, and actions are configured in the Then do this section below.
Creating new automations
To create the first Automation in a solution, simply click the Create my first Automation button on the initial splash screen to get started.
After you've added at least one Automation, you create new Automations from the Automation list. Just click the + Add Automation button and the bottom of the dialog:
Smart Points: Automations
Use Automations to power-up your workflows
You can use SmartSuite Automations to supercharge workflows by changing status conditions or sending email notifications to an approver when a task is complete and ready for review.
An Automation can be used to guarantee a message is sent instantly
Some users prefer to receive SmartSuite notification emails in batches - called digests - that combine notifications into a summary that they read daily or weekly. But what if that email needs to go out right away?
Just use a SmartSuite Send an Email action - as soon as the rules you set trigger the Automation, your important email will be on its way. You also have access to a much broader set of conditions and possible recipients for your notification when configuring it as an Automation.
How your team can use Automations?
Human Resources
Your HR team can create automations for upcoming interviews, let candidates know when you have received their resume, follow up on prospects, and migrate candidate information into your HR application when they’re hired.
Marketing
Your Marketing team can develop campaigns that automatically send email or text messages, inform management about results, generate reminders to account managers when customer segments haven’t had outreach in a certain period of time, and automatically create quarterly marketing campaign records.
Information Technology
An IT team can automate notifications to the appropriate employee given the service request, create notifications for incident reporting, and automate the process of hiring new employees.
Our continued development of easy-to-configure yet more powerful automations gives you more control of your workflow, saves you time, and ensures a higher level of accuracy than you get with manual input.
> Creating an Automation
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