Introduction. Pain Points in Automating Business with Make.com
Expanding a business often necessitates adopting automation tools. While Make.com offers a robust platform for such tasks, it is not without its challenges, especially at the enterprise level. Integrating and scaling business processes with Make.com can present several pain points that may hinder growth and efficiency. Understanding these challenges is crucial for businesses aiming to leverage automation for enterprise success.
- Operational transparency: It’s difficult to monitor the scenarios and detect what’s broken and what’s functioning properly — issues can arise when you’re offline.
- Limited Backups: Limited backup windows of 30-60 days mean you can’t always restore deleted scenarios or organizations.
- Inconsistencies: Maintaining development standards and preventing common mistakes becomes challenging when working with large teams.
- Failures due to scenario updates and changes. It happens when updates or modifications to scenarios cause systems or processes that previously worked to stop functioning properly.
Let’s dive into how Value Added Tech solves these problems!
1. Operational transparency: It’s difficult to detect what’s broken and what’s functioning properly — issues can arise when you’re offline.
Solution 1: Make.com scenarios and Slack
To prevent this, we use several scenarios that work directly through Make API, checking their status. Connecting the client to the monitoring system is as simple as possible. We have a system account that needs to be added as an admin in the client’s Make.com account. After that, we get full access to all scenarios and start collecting, filling, and monitoring the client’s scenarios. Additional scenarios are used for the Slack bot and manage messages and buttons in them.
The monitoring polls every 20 minutes all scenarios, and when the status of the scenario becomes Turned OFF, we receive a detailed message in the Slack channel of the following type:
The error message allows us to see what is wrong with the scenario as well as quickly restart and update the information about it.
Thanks to that, we fix the scenarios really quickly. In the Airtable dashboard, we can see daily statistics on failed and fixed scenarios, as well as the number of incidents over the past three months and the average time it takes us to fix a scenario.
Our SLA guarantees that critical fixes will be resolved within 2 hours during work hours. Currently, our average resolution time is 2 hours, even when counting weekends and time off. Note that these statistics include larger fixes that sometimes take days.
Solution 2: Auto Fix
We have implemented an auto turn-on option for critical scenarios which tend to fail due to a number of reasons. They can cause scenarios to “drop silently” more often, due to 429, 500 and other common errors of such apps as Hubspot, Airtable, Google Sheets etc. However, typically, a simple restart fixes them. Without a specialized system, you might only realize that a scenario isn’t running after some time, or possibly not at all, leading to significant business losses.
Our Robusta System not only identifies whether the scenario is working but also automatically turns it on again if it isn’t. This allows us to fix scenarios 24/7 without any manual intervention. Additionally, if a scenario cannot be fixed with a simple restart, the system will send a message to Slack, alerting the team to fix it through other methods ASAP.
Each fix typically requires 15-20 minutes of manual work. For scenarios with over 100 modules, it can take up to an entire working day to handle them. Moreover, If a bug isn’t fixed quickly, resolving it later becomes much harder due to growing issues like increased backlog and impact on connected systems. Delays can lead to more severe consequences and complications. Fixing bugs promptly ensures smoother operations and prevents cascading problems. This feature saves Value Added Tech hundreds of hours of manual work each month, as well as thousands of our clients’ dollars.
2. Limited backup and Execution logs windows of 30-60 days mean you can’t always restore deleted scenarios or organizations.
Make.com only allows us to see the versions of a scenario within 30 or 60 days. Execution logs are also stored within 30-60 days, making it crucial to prioritize timely recovery actions and ensure comprehensive data retention strategies are in place to avoid permanent data loss or operational disruptions.
Additionally, if a scenario or even an entire workspace is deleted, it is permanently gone. This often happens due to human error, especially if the clients’ employees have access to scenarios. It also opens opportunities for fraudsters and scammers to cause losses to your business.
The last time this happened, it was to one of our clients, a large company that processes over 1,000 leads daily. The scenario was renamed and then accidentally deleted by the new employee. Thanks to our backup system, it took us only 20 minutes to get everything working again. Without our system, there could have been significant losses: three working days spent on manual restoration and number of lost leads. In monetary terms, this would have amounted to $2-3k for developers’ work and $40,000 for the lost leads.
Solution: Backup System
Value Added Tech has prevented this by implementing a backup system that automatically and regularly saves scenario blueprints. For all active scenarios, a JSON blueprint file of the current version of the scenario is saved on Google Drive. These files are used as a backup, and in case of scenario deletion, we quickly restore the current version and relaunch it back into operation.
Moreover, enterprise companies choose Value Added Tech, because Robusta allows us to add all the scenarios to the system immediately. Thus, we have onboarded several clients who had already had hundreds of scenarios each and spent just a few minutes for that.
Robusta’s streamlined onboarding process enables clients to integrate a vast number of scenarios into the system almost instantaneously. This efficiency means that clients who already have over 700 scenarios can have them fully incorporated within just a few minutes. This rapid integration offers several key advantages for the client:
Time Efficiency: Clients save significant time, avoiding the typically lengthy process of manually inputting each scenario. This quick setup allows them to focus on more strategic tasks rather than administrative ones.
Immediate Operational Readiness: By having all scenarios onboarded almost instantly, clients can begin utilizing the full functionality of the Robusta system right away. This ensures that their operational processes are not disrupted and can continue smoothly without a prolonged transition period.
Reduced Implementation Costs: The rapid onboarding reduces the amount of labor and resources needed to input scenarios. This can lead to cost savings, making the integration process more economical for the client.
Consistency and Accuracy: Automated onboarding minimizes the risk of errors that can occur with manual data entry. This ensures that all scenarios are accurately reflected in the system, maintaining data integrity and reliability.
Scalability: Robusta’s system is designed to handle large volumes of data seamlessly, which means that as clients grow and their scenarios increase, the system can easily accommodate this expansion without requiring additional time or effort for integration.
Enhanced Client Experience: The swift and efficient onboarding process improves overall client satisfaction. Clients can experience the benefits of the Robusta system almost immediately, reinforcing their decision to choose this solution.
3. Maintaining development standards and preventing common mistakes becomes challenging when working with large teams.
Solution 1: Code reviews
Code reviews are conducted either weekly, upon request, or when scenarios change, ensuring a resource-effective approach by reviewing code only after significant changes or scenarios have been implemented.
Recently, our Code Review process revealed an issue that had been undetected for several months. During this process, we discovered that 7 scenarios had been consistently and silently returning incorrect dispositions for years.
We have attached the log data from this time frame for further analysis. This incident demonstrates the effectiveness of our automated testing in identifying long-standing issues and highlights the improvements made to resolve them. Also it helps us release our solutions 50% faster.
It is crucial to communicate this finding to the team, emphasizing the value of the Quality Assurance tool and the significance of the recent fix. This case serves as a testament to the success of our enhanced quality control measures and the positive impact they have on maintaining system accuracy.
Solution 2: Prediction and Statistics
We also gather information about scenarios that fail more often than others. This allows us to predict failures, identify the most common errors, systematically analyze systems, and implement systematic fixes and measures.
4. Failures due to scenario updates and changes.
It happens when updates or modifications to scenarios cause systems or processes that previously worked to stop functioning properly.
Solution: Auto tests
Auto tests are a recently implemented part of Robusta, developed to test scenarios automatically. We develop and run auto tests according to top standards. When any of our scenarios are changed, tests are run automatically. After that, we receive a Slack message indicating whether the auto test was successful.
The system also tests all scenarios that include data stores.
It’s common for a data store to become full, causing the scenario to stop, which leads to data and lead loss for the client. Our Robusta feature performs hundreds of auto tests monthly and sends notifications to a Slack channel. This way, we always know when a data store is about to be full and can prevent the scenario from stopping.
By our count, we saved over $5,000 for our clients this month thanks to auto tests. These are definite advantages of investing in professional services. Furthermore, we can assure our clients that our solution will function correctly even before its release.
5. 
Additional opportunities to grow
Robusta performs over 2 million scenario checks and tests each month. A typical developer would spend over $1,000 for this volume. However, the system we developed using Airtable and Make.com (without the need for additional custom programming) allows us to spend 30 times less operations and money: $120 instead of $3,000+. Thanks to this approach, our system is highly scalable. We can easily support ten times the current volume without significantly increasing the load on the system. This ensures that our infrastructure remains robust and efficient, even as demand grows.
For instance, on 24th July, more than 70,000 checks were performed by our system using just 2,236 operations!
Conclusion
To sum up, Make.com has been crucial in automating our processes, earning praise from us and our clients over 7 years. Based on our experience, we are certain that Make.com remains the best automation tool, enhancing efficiency, reliability, and fostering growth in today’s dynamic business environment, despite the issues we mentioned in the article. Our scalable approach maximizes the platform’s effectiveness and allows for full integration into large organizations. Moreover, it enables us to handle increased volume without compromising performance.
As your Make.com system grows and operates over the years, keeping track of the efficiency of hundreds of scenarios can become challenging and time-consuming.
Value Added Tech implemented an AI-driven automated system that seamlessly worked with Make.com and Airtable to address these issues. Discover how it works here.