Google Workspace Workflow Automation

What is zenphi?

zenphi is a no-code business process automation platform built explicitly for Google Workspace users. It enables you and the whole set of new people in your company to automate their processes without writing a single line of code.

These processes can be any type of process, from a simple, short-living process to complex processes that take months or even years.

zenphi comes with advanced features like State Machine, Parallel Branches, Task Form, and Conditional Switch to create sophisticated solutions. Aside from zenphi’s extensive integration with Google Workspace, its native integration with systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Twilio, DocuSign (and many more) opens the door to easily communicate with multiple systems as part of your automated process. You do all of that without needing to write any Apps Script or code.

Before starting with zenphi, you need to familiarize yourself with five basic concepts.

1. Flow

Everything in zenphi revolves around Flows. A Flow is the implementation of a process or part of a process. For example, suppose you may have a process for employees to request a new laptop, in which an employee puts in a request. In that case the manager should approve it, and then IT should order the laptop. 

To automate this process, you create a Flow that starts with a Google Forms (that employees use to submit their requests); the Flow then identifies the requester’s manager and assigns her a task to approve the request. If she approves the request, it will send an email to IT or over the laptop.  

2. Trigger

We call the event that initiates your process (or Flow in this case) a Trigger. Like you may want your Flow to start when a specific Google Forms is submitted or when an email arrives in a particular Gmail inbox. 

The events that trigger a Flow to start are not limited to the world of Google Workspace.  They also can be events from other systems that you use or even manual events that you or your colleagues initiate.

Once you tell zenphi the systems you want to monitor and the events you’re interested in, zenphi continuously keeps an eye on it. 

Each Trigger may have metadata that translates into Start Parameters for the Flow. For example, if your Google Forms captures First Name, Last Name, and Date of Birth, those values are passed to the Flow as Start Parameters. Please note that the type of Trigger you choose determines which Start Parameters you can use in a Flow. 

Triggers currently available in zenphi.

3. Action/Step

Actions or Steps are the building blocks of your Flow. Each Action can perform one of the following tasks:

• Interact with another system or person. (add a row to Sheets, post a message to Slack, send an email, or assign a task to a person)
• Evaluate a condition. (if condition, switch based on a certain value, state machine, loop until ).
• Perform an operation. (format a date or a number, convert a number, get the current date and time, multiply/add/subtract/divide numbers)
• Auditing and debugging. (log to history)

Depending on how you define your process, Actions happen one after the other (sequentially) or at the same moment (in parallel). To add an Action to your process, just drag-drop and configure it.

Some Actions have output, and some don’t. If they do, the output of that Action is available to all following Actions in the Flow.

To configure an Action, click on the cogs icon, and start setting values in the sliding panel. Wherever you see the “variable picker” icon, it means you can dynamically configure that Action to use Start Parameters or the output of previous Actions. 

For example, you can construct the email subject to use the values you received from the Google Forms that started the Flow.

4. Connection

If you want to update a Google Sheet as part of your process, you need to create a Google Sheet Connection so that zenphi can update your Google Sheet. This Connection grants zenphi access to the Google Sheet file on your behalf. Some of the Connections are read-only. Those are good enough if you only need to read data from those systems. If your process needs to edit anything in a system, you should use the standard Connection.

Some of the out-of-the-box Connections from zenphi.

These are some of the out-of-the-box Connections zenphi has made available. Frequently zenphi adds new Connections to allow you to connect easily with the systems and platforms of your choice. With zenphi’s Webhook/HTTP Connection, you connect to any system or platform for which zenphi does not have an out-of-the-box Connection.  

To use a Connection, you must first create and authorize that Connection to access data on your behalf. After this, you add the Connection to your Flow in the settings from an Action.

You can create a connection from the Connections page or click on the “+” sign in the Connections control in an Action. You don’t need to create for every Action or Flow new Connections. Different actions in different Flows can reuse the same Connections.

5. Flow Runs

Once you finish the design of your Flow, you publish the Flow so that a Trigger will start the execution of the Flow. Each time the configured Trigger fires, zenphi creates an instance of the Flow and executes it. We call the execution of a Flow a “Flow Run”.

When you submit a Google Forms, zenphi creates an instance of the Flow linked with the Google Forms, and zenphi will execute all Actions you have defined in the Flow. Or, if you have configured your Flow Trigger to run every one hour, an instance of the Flow is started and completed every hour. 

A Flow Run can have different statuses: Executing, Completed, Failed, Canceled, or Skipped. When a Flow Run fails, something went wrong during the execution of the Flow. You can then identify the cause of the failure, correct it, and re-run the flow.  In some cases, you can continue the execution from the moment the Flow Run failed. 

You can see all Flow Runs in the “Recent Runs” section. You see the previous Flow Runs and their status. If you would like to see the details of a Flow Run, you can click on it and see the executed  Actions, how long it took, and more information about the Flow Run.

Next

Now that you understand the five fundamental concepts of zenphi, it is time to try zenphi yourself.  And experience How easy you automate Google Workspace processes with zenphi.