Make.com For Operations

The Operations Automation Opportunity

Operations workflows typically share a common structure: event happens → notify stakeholders → route for action → track status → report results. This structure is exactly what Make.com is built for.

Operations bottlenecks Make.com addresses:

• Manual routing of requests to the right approver
• Inconsistent onboarding steps (some get done, some get missed)
• Status updates that require chasing across tools
• Reports that take hours to manually compile
• Multi-system updates required when one thing changes

Each of these is an opportunity for automation that saves real time and prevents real mistakes.

Employee Onboarding Automation

Scenario: New employee → full onboarding workflow

Manual onboarding is inconsistent — different managers follow different checklists, things get missed, new employees wait days for access to tools.

1. Trigger: New employee record created in HRIS (BambooHR, Workday) or form submission from HR
2. Parallel actions:

- Slack: Send welcome message to the new employee (via DM) - Google Workspace Admin HTTP: Create employee Google account - GitHub API: Add to appropriate team - Notion: Create onboarding page from template

1. Create tasks in project management (Asana/ClickUp):

- IT: Provision laptop (due day -3) - IT: Set up workstation (due day -1) - Manager: Complete 30-day goal setting (due day 7) - HR: Confirm all systems access (due day 1)

1. Slack: Notify manager with checklist of what was automated and what still needs manual action
2. Airtable: Create onboarding tracker record

Every new employee gets the same complete onboarding experience, with automatable steps handled immediately.

Procurement and Purchase Requests

Scenario: Purchase request → approval → order

1. Webhook: Employee submits purchase request form (Typeform or internal form)
2. Router: Branch by request amount

- Under $500: auto-approve + notify manager - $500-5,000: route to direct manager for approval - Over $5,000: route to VP for approval

1. For manager/VP approval path:

- Slack message to approver with Approve/Reject buttons (Block Kit interactive message) - Approver clicks → Make.com receives the button click via webhook - Approval → send to next step; Rejection → notify requester with reason

1. On approval:

- Create purchase order record in Airtable or your ERP - Email vendor (if pre-approved supplier) - Notify requester

1. Finance: Update budget tracking spreadsheet/Airtable

Procurement requests never sit waiting for a routing decision — they go to the right approver immediately.

SLA Monitoring

Scenario: Track and alert on SLA violations

1. Schedule trigger: Every 30 minutes
2. Zendesk/Freshdesk Search: Open tickets past their SLA due time
3. Iterator: Process each at-risk ticket
4. Slack alert: "#support-escalations: Ticket #[id] is [N minutes] past SLA response time. Customer: [name]. Issue: [summary]. Assigned to: [agent]"
5. Zendesk Update: Add "SLA Violated" tag and bump priority
6. HubSpot Update Contact: If the contact is a high-value customer, create an escalation task for account manager

No SLA violation goes unnoticed. The right person is alerted immediately.

Cross-System Status Sync

Operations often requires that a status in one system updates a status in another:

Scenario: Project status propagation

1. Asana trigger: Task marked complete
2. Router: Branch by task type

- "Proposal Sent" task complete → HubSpot Update Deal stage to "Proposal Sent" - "Contract Signed" task complete → HubSpot Update Deal to "Closed Won" + trigger onboarding - "Invoice Sent" task complete → Airtable Update billing record

1. Slack notification: Relevant channel updated

Project management updates propagate to CRM and finance without manual entry.

Incident Response Coordination

Scenario: System alert → coordinated response

1. Webhook trigger: Alert from monitoring tool (PagerDuty, Datadog, New Relic)
2. Severity router: Branch by alert severity

- P1 (critical) → Create incident Slack channel + invite on-call team + page via PagerDuty - P2 (high) → Slack alert to engineering channel + create Jira/Linear issue - P3 (medium) → Create Jira issue + add to monitoring queue

1. Status page: HTTP Request to Statuspage.io to update status for customer-facing issues
2. HubSpot: If customer-affecting, create task for CSM to communicate proactively

Incident response coordination — the right people in the right places with the right information — happens automatically within 60 seconds of an alert firing.

Recommended Tools

• Make.com — Operations automation platform
• Airtable — Operations tracker and procurement database
• Slack — Team notifications and approval workflows
• HubSpot — CRM status sync
• Claude API — AI analysis for operational insights
• PagerDuty — On-call and incident alerting

“Operations automation doesn't remove people from decisions — it removes people from the routing, tracking, and status-checking that surrounds decisions. They focus on the decision itself.”