Lead capture from website forms, paid ad landing pages, and inbound email routed into your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive) with automatic deduplication, lead scoring, owner assignment by territory or round-robin, and immediate sequence enrollment in your outreach tool (Outreach, Salesloft). Activity signals -- email opens, demo page visits, document views -- trigger score updates and sales tasks automatically, so your reps act on hot leads within minutes, not days. Deal stage progression triggers automated follow-up task creation, stakeholder notification, and document generation (proposals, contracts via DocuSign). Stale deal alerts fire when a deal has had no activity for your defined threshold, surfacing the risk to the pipeline before it becomes a missed quarter. Win/loss notifications push to finance for invoicing triggering and to product for feedback capture.

Multi-level approval workflows replacing the email chains where requests sit unread for days: purchase approvals routed to manager then finance based on amount thresholds, contract approvals with legal review at defined dollar amounts, expense reimbursements validated against policy before reaching the approver's queue. Conditional routing based on requester department, amount, vendor category, or any other attribute stored in your ERP or HR system.

The orchestration layer is built on Temporal.io for long-running, durable approval workflows where the process may span hours or days. Temporal's workflow history model means an approval waiting for a response on day three does not lose state if the server restarts, and the retry policy handles transient failures in downstream API calls (updating your ERP, sending a Slack notification) using exponential backoff with configurable maximum retries before routing to a dead letter queue for investigation. Idempotency keys on every state-change operation ensure that a retry after a network failure does not duplicate an approval record, a GL posting, or a notification.

SLA timers trigger escalation to the next approver level if sign-off does not happen within the defined window -- no more approvals stalling because someone is on holiday. Requesters see status in a self-service portal without sending follow-up emails. Parallel approvals use the saga pattern internally: they route simultaneously to multiple required sign-offs, gate on completion of all, and execute a compensation step (reverting a reserved budget amount, notifying the requester) if any required sign-off is rejected rather than leaving partial approvals in an inconsistent state. Every approval action captured in an immutable audit trail with timestamp, actor, decision, and optional notes for SOX and compliance reporting.

Automated customer onboarding sequences triggered by contract signing (DocuSign/Adobe Sign webhook) or first payment (Stripe webhook): account provisioning in your product, kickoff email from the assigned CSM, welcome sequence with resource links, document collection requests with automated reminders, training session scheduling via Calendly, and kickoff meeting invite with pre-read materials. Status dashboard shows your team where each customer sits in the onboarding sequence, which steps are overdue, and which customers haven't logged in since account creation. Escalation triggers fire when a customer misses a required step by more than a defined number of days -- flagging churn risk early, while there's still time to intervene. Time-to-value tracking measures how long it takes each cohort to complete onboarding and reach their first key activation milestone, informing improvement decisions.

End-to-end procurement automation from purchase request through PO issuance: request submitted via form or email, routed to budget owner for approval, PO generated in your ERP (SAP MM, NetSuite, Dynamics), and emailed to the vendor without manual data entry at each step. Webhook triggers on PO acknowledgement from the supplier update the ERP record automatically, eliminating the manual confirmation step that AP teams currently chase by phone.

Invoice receipt triggers a three-way match against the approved PO and goods receipt confirmation before routing to payment authorisation -- invoices that do not match on quantity, unit price, or supplier identity hold for AP review rather than passing through unchecked. The matching logic is implemented as an Apache Airflow DAG for scheduled batch processing of high-volume invoice queues, or as an event-driven n8n workflow for lower-volume environments where an AP clerk processes invoices on receipt. Retry logic on the ERP posting step uses exponential backoff (initial 30s, maximum 5 retries) before routing failed postings to a dead letter queue with a Slack alert to the finance operations team for investigation.

Expense reports validated against policy (within category limits, receipts attached, approver matches org chart) before reaching the finance team. Audit logging captures every state transition -- request submitted, PO approved, invoice received, matched, approved, paid -- with actor, timestamp, and the field values at each stage, producing a complete paper trail for audit without manual documentation.

Order-to-shipment automation: order placed in your e-commerce platform (Shopify, WooCommerce) triggers inventory check, picks the optimal fulfilment location, generates a pick list, prints a shipping label via your carrier (FedEx, UPS, Royal Mail), and sends a tracking notification to the customer -- all without manual touchpoints. Service request workflows: ticket created in Zendesk or Freshdesk triggers automatic assignment based on skill, availability, and SLA, with escalation if response SLA is not met. Field service automation: job created, technician assigned based on location and skillset, work order delivered to mobile app, parts requested from inventory, and work order closed with photo documentation on job completion. The status updates your customers are waiting for and your team is manually sending get automated from the same workflow triggers.

Bidirectional data synchronization between systems that don't have native integrations and whose data drift creates the reconciliation problem your ops team handles every week: CRM and ERP contact records staying in sync when either system is updated, product catalog in your inventory system matching your e-commerce storefront in real time, customer status in your support tool reflecting the subscription state in your billing system. Event-driven triggers update related records immediately when source data changes -- no nightly batch sync creating a 24-hour window where systems show different data. Scheduled batch sync handles the legacy systems that don't support webhooks. Conflict resolution logic handles the bidirectional case where both systems update the same field simultaneously, applying last-write-wins or merge rules depending on the data type. Dead-letter queues capture failed sync events for investigation rather than silently dropping them.