Your business is complicated, and despite the broad array of services offered in Zoho One, you may find that automating aspects of your process requires more granular attention, or more robust workflow logic than Zoho’s standard integration tools can offer. Parts of your process may not fit into Zoho’s offerings at all.
At Growthline, we believe Zoho Flow is the “Missing Ingredient” that many businesses overlook in strategizing their Zoho Experience. As a relatively new product with broad capabilities, Zoho Flow’s value proposition is not always clear to stakeholders. Marketing materials on Flow imply a high technical bar of entry, and despite its visual designer / “No Code” interface, it can be an intimidating product, even to those familiar with other parts of the Zoho One.
We have used Zoho Flow successfully on multiple projects, and a description of its capabilities from that perspective may be of use. To date, we have utilized Zoho flow as…
A way to monitor granular modules within Zoho One
For instance, the native CRM workflow designer will not allow notes to trigger a workflow ,and can make precise task creation inconvenient. Zoho Flow is able to monitor the creation of both notes and tasks, and incorporate them into complex workflows.
A tool to achieve total connectivity within Zoho One
Even though individual products within Zoho One contain convenient linkages to other products, we find these integrations to be inconsistent across products. Furthermore, developers creating cross-product connectivity within standalone products run the risk of workflow collisions, and reverse engineering / handing off such architecture to new developers can be an engineering nightmare. Zoho Flow solves this problem by providing a centralized, versioned point of integration across Zoho products; a single authoritative point developers can depend on to get a Big Picture view of cross-product integrations.
A way to create more powerful workflows
Unfortunately, most product-level workflow designers within Zoho One are limited not just in their interoperability with other Zoho products, but in their ability to create complex workflows. Zoho Flows can contain long chains of complex logic, with the ability to back reference each step within the flow, fetch data from other systems (Zoho and external) mid-flow, and merge all that data together into custom modules. Furthermore, it provides a centralized point of logging for these steps. There is simply no other tool this powerful for workflow design within Zoho One.
A cutover tool for migrating to/from Zoho
For complex migration scenarios which may require real-time cutover alongside data imports, Zoho Flow can be used to set up custom RESTful endpoints into Zoho, allowing virtually any system to send data into Zoho. Similarly, Flow can provide a single point of egress for data migrating out of Zoho’s ecosystem.
A means of connecting to tools outside of Zoho One
For businesses running tools outside of Zoho One, Zoho Flow provides over 600 templates for straightforward connectivity to products like Wrike, Microsoft Office365/Teams, Slack, Expensify, Salesforce, Quickbooks, and more. Custom connectors can be developed as well, making Zoho Flow an incredibly powerful, flexible tool capable of connecting Zoho to the rest of the Web.
The use cases for Zoho Flow are many, but complexity may vary. Growthline can help you use Zoho Flow to get the most out of Zoho One at any stage.
For over 10 years, Growthline Partners has been successfully providing consulting and integration services to B2B and B2C companies. We leverage our certified consultant’s technical experience and industry knowledge to design and build systems that help our clients accelerate their revenue and increase customer service by designing and building business operations platforms.
About the Author
Jesse Pakin is a Principal, Architecture with Growthline Partners. He is a veteran of the technology industry and has held senior technology and management positions including Vice President of Technology and CIO with Kanban Solutions, ICAP and itBit Trust Company. He is a certified Zoho Developer, AWS Solutions Architect and has extensive sector experience in the financial services, pharmaceutical and manufacturing industries.