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A plain-English guide to automating the work that actually slows you down. Whether you're just curious about what's possible or ready to build the thing yourself, start here.
45 patterns
Stop calling a failing dependency before it drags you down with it. After a threshold of errors, open the circuit, fail fast for a cooldown period, then cautiously let traffic back in.
Coordinate a multi-step business transaction that spans several systems by pairing each step with a rollback action. If a later step fails, run the rollbacks in reverse to restore a consistent state.
Route alerts and notifications through the right channel (email, Teams, SMS, push) based on urgency, recipient preferences, and business hours. Always reach the right person at the right time.
Periodically check an external system for changes and trigger workflows when new or updated records are detected. The reliable alternative when webhooks aren't available.
Route purchase requests, expense reports, and financial approvals through different approval chains based on the dollar amount. Low-value requests skip senior approvers; high-value requests get more scrutiny.
Send approval requests to multiple people simultaneously and proceed when a minimum number approve. Faster than serial chains for peer-level decisions.
Route a request through a sequence of approvers where each must approve before the next receives it. The simplest and most common approval pattern.
Manage a contract from initial draft through negotiation, review, approval, e-signature, execution, and renewal. A complete lifecycle workflow for legal and procurement teams.
Collect data from multiple sources, merge it into a formatted document, route it for review and approval, then store the final version. The backbone of contract, proposal, and report workflows.
Coordinate the multi-department new-hire onboarding process — from IT provisioning and HR paperwork to manager introductions and training enrollment. Ensure nothing falls through the cracks.
Accept file uploads (CSV, Excel), validate every row against business rules, report errors to the submitter, and import clean data into the target system. The essential pattern for bulk data intake.
Split a workload into parallel branches, process them simultaneously, then aggregate the results. Dramatically reduces processing time for batch operations.
Gracefully handle transient API failures by retrying with increasing delays. Essential for any workflow that calls external services.
Model a business process as a set of defined states with explicit transitions between them. Unlike linear workflows, items can move forwards, backwards, and loop — matching how real business processes actually behave.
Automatically cut access, recover assets, and close loops when an employee or contractor leaves. Cleanup that's boring when it works and catastrophic when it doesn't.
Record every significant action to an append-only log that can be inspected but not altered. Essential for compliance, incident response, and answering 'who changed this and when?'
Periodically review who has access to what, confirm it's still needed, and revoke what isn't. Kills the slow-drip accumulation of stale permissions that turn into audit findings.
Route incoming documents — PDFs, scanned images, email attachments — by extracting text and classifying them automatically. Replaces human eyeballs at the front door.
Let a defined group weigh in on a decision and apply a rule — unanimous, majority, weighted — to pick the outcome. Good for steering-committee approvals, board decisions, and committee reviews.
Require two independent approvers for high-risk actions, where the initiator cannot also be an approver. Cuts fraud, fat-finger errors, and insider risk at the cost of a few minutes per decision.
Distribute incoming work evenly across a team by rotating through assignees in order. Simple, predictable, fair — and exactly right when skill is uniform and load balance matters.
Put tasks in a shared queue and let qualified agents claim work rather than pre-assigning. Keeps the busiest person busy, the best person on the hardest case, and nothing in the wrong inbox.
Push modelled data from your warehouse back into the SaaS tools that business teams use every day — CRM, marketing, support — so they can act on analytics without a BI detour.
Stream row-level changes out of a database in near real-time using the transaction log. No polling, no app changes — downstream systems get inserts, updates, and deletes as they happen.
One event, many independent consumers. Publishers don't know who's listening; subscribers don't know who else is. Decouples producers from consumers so each can evolve independently.
Tag every side-effecting request with a unique key, persist the outcome, and return the stored result on replays. Stops duplicate charges, duplicate tickets, and duplicate emails dead.
Externalize complex branching logic — pricing tiers, eligibility rules, routing decisions — into a readable table that business users can maintain without a developer in the loop.
Automation handles the routine work, but pauses for a human to review, validate, or make a judgment call at critical decision points. The best of both worlds.
Capture workflow items that fail processing after all retry attempts are exhausted. Store them safely for investigation, manual correction, and replay — never silently lose data.
Take a basic record and enhance it with data from external APIs — geocoding addresses, resolving company info, validating phone numbers, scoring leads. Transform minimal input into rich, actionable data.
Receive real-time events from external systems via webhooks, validate them, and trigger the appropriate workflow response. The foundation of reactive automation.
Process a queue of items on a recurring schedule — daily reconciliation, weekly reports, hourly sync jobs. The workhorse pattern for routine data processing.
Route documents through a multi-party signing ceremony with defined signing order, reminders, and completion tracking. Works with Nintex Sign, DocuSign, and Adobe Sign.
Iterate through a list of items one by one — applying business logic, calling APIs, and making decisions per item. The simpler cousin of Fan-Out/Fan-In for smaller collections.
Evaluate, verify, and approve new vendors before they can do business with your organisation. Collect documentation, perform due diligence, assess risk, and make go/no-go decisions.
Automatically reroute approval tasks to a designated delegate when the primary approver is out of office. Prevents process stalls during vacations, sick leave, and travel.
Automatically escalate a task when the assigned person hasn't responded within a defined SLA. Prevents process stalls and enforces accountability.
Monitor an inbox, extract structured data from incoming emails and attachments, validate it, and feed it into downstream workflows. Turn unstructured email into actionable data.
Allow customers to register, provide required documentation, and get verified through an automated workflow. Reduce manual intake work while maintaining KYC and compliance requirements.
Route work items to different people or queues based on multiple criteria evaluated together. More maintainable than nested if-else chains.
Process CCPA, GDPR, and other data subject access requests (DSARs) within legally mandated timeframes. Manage intake, identity verification, data collection, review, and response.
Keep records synchronized between two or more systems. Handles create/update/delete propagation with conflict resolution. Essential for multi-system environments.
Compare records between two systems to find mismatches, missing entries, and data drift. The detective pattern that finds problems before they become costly — essential for finance, HR, and IT.
Collect events throughout the day or week, then send a single consolidated summary instead of individual notifications. Reduce noise while keeping stakeholders informed.
Enforce mandatory review and documentation at specific points in a process to meet regulatory, legal, or internal policy requirements. Non-negotiable gates that cannot be bypassed.