Business process automation that does not collapse the moment one tool changes.

Durable automations on event-driven middleware. Full audit trails. 100% Australian engineers.

The case for serious automation

The first round of business process automation in most companies is done with Zapier or Make. This is appropriate. Those tools are powerful, fast to deploy, and well suited to simple workflows. For most automations, a Zap built on a Friday afternoon is the right answer for years.

The second round is where the trouble starts. The Zapier estate grows. There are now 40+ Zaps. Three or four staff members have built Zaps that touch business-critical workflows. Nobody has documented what most of them do. Some are paused and forgotten. Some run on a personal account that nobody can access. When a Zap breaks, the impact is felt before anyone notices.

The right answer is rarely to delete the Zaps. The Zaps got the automation done. The right answer is to consolidate the business-critical automation onto durable infrastructure (event-driven middleware, idempotent handlers, real monitoring) and keep Zapier for the low-stakes ad-hoc stuff. The split is the work.

The honest moment most automation agencies skip: most of your Zaps should stay where they are. The problem is rarely the existence of the Zaps. The problem is the four or five flows that touch money, customer data, or compliance running on the same fragile infrastructure as the flow that posts a Slack message when somebody fills in a form. Those four or five need rebuilding. The rest are fine.

If you have an automation estate that is silently expensive, call 0431 000 062. We will help you sort what stays in Zapier from what should be properly engineered.

Symptoms to look for

Automation estates fail in patterns. These are the signs that the estate has graduated from helpful tool to operational risk.

• You have more than 20 Zaps or Make scenarios. Nobody can list them all from memory. The Friday afternoon question “do we still need this one?” is now unanswerable.
• A Zap broke once and nobody noticed for two weeks. Customers, finance, or operations were affected. The Zap had no monitoring because it was supposed to be a small productivity hack. It had quietly become operational infrastructure.
• Multiple people have automation logins. Each has built their own. Nobody can see the whole estate. The marketing manager built three. The sales manager built five. Operations have nine. They all touch each other in ways nobody has documented.
• You are paying for premium Zapier or Make tiers. And exceeding the limits regularly. The next tier up costs more than rebuilding the critical flows on durable infrastructure would.
• Critical workflows depend on automation nobody owns. “I think Sarah built that one. She left in March.” The institutional knowledge of how the automation works left with the person who built it.
• Your automation breaks every time a connected vendor updates their API. You only find out because the data stops flowing. The vendor sent a deprecation email six months ago. Nobody at your end was monitoring the inbox.
• Audit and compliance questions cannot be answered from the automation logs. A regulator or insurer asks “who triggered this transaction and when?” and the answer requires reconstruction from Zapier’s task history, which only goes back 30 days.

DIAGNOSTIC

If three or more apply, your automation has graduated from a productivity tool to operational infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be engineered, not glued.

The architecture we deploy

Durable automation looks different from script automation. The principles matter. The difference between a workflow that survives Monday morning and a workflow that ruins it is rarely the language it is written in. It is the engineering principles underneath.

Map before you replace

We do not start by ripping out Zaps. We start by mapping what every automation does, who owns it, and how critical it is. Some Zaps deserve to keep running in Zapier. Some need rebuilding. Some can be retired entirely. The audit produces a categorised inventory. You cannot consolidate what you have not first inventoried.

Move the critical ones to event-driven middleware

Business-critical automations move onto a proper event-driven layer. Every state change in a connected system fires a typed event. Handlers subscribe. Retries are automatic. Failures are surfaced, not silent. The same infrastructure we deploy for API integration projects. Critical flows belong on infrastructure built for criticality.

Leave the low-stakes ones in Zapier

We are not anti-Zapier. We are anti-Zapier-running-payroll-flows. Workflows that are low-stakes and high-change are better off in Zapier. The consolidation work targets the dangerous middle: business-critical workflows on fragile infrastructure. The Slack notification when a deal closes can stay where it is. The customer payment reconciliation cannot.

Monitoring and alerting that actually fires

Every automation we build has monitoring built in. If a flow fails, you find out within minutes, not weeks. Alerts go to a real human, not a Slack channel nobody reads. Error rates, throughput, queue depth, and processing latency are all visible on a dashboard. An automation you cannot monitor is an automation that will eventually fail silently.

Audit trails that hold up

Every event, every transformation, every retry is logged with timestamps and payloads. When the auditor asks what happened on 14 March at 3:47pm, you open a dashboard and show them. Zapier’s task history is helpful for debugging recent issues. It is not a durable audit log. For business-critical workflows, you need real audit trails that survive regulatory review. The cost of building this in from day one is a fraction of the cost of retrofitting it after the auditor calls.

Three engagement shapes

We structure automation engagements one of three ways. All three start with the audit.

• Automation audit. From $3,000. Inventory and categorisation of every Zap and Make scenario. Consolidation plan with fixed-scope quotes. Standalone deliverable. About one in five audits ends with our recommendation to leave the entire estate in Zapier and just improve monitoring. The audit cost is the audit deliverable, not a sales pitch.
• Critical flow rebuild. From $10,000. Rebuild one to three business-critical automations on event-driven middleware. Best when you already know which flows are causing the most pain. Production-ready in two to four weeks per flow.
• Full consolidation. From $30,000. Audit plus rebuild of every business-critical automation. Decommission of redundant Zaps. New monitoring and alerting. Best when the estate has grown past the point of incremental fixes.

Call 0431 000 062 to find out which is right for your situation.

Automations we have built

Three consolidation engagements. One named, two confidential at client request. Reference calls available under NDA.

Infinity Fire, fire safety compliance

• Problem: Field services team re-keying job data between Homes NSW, Uptick, and the accounting system. Compliance reporting taking three days a month. A previous Zapier-based attempt at automation had failed silently twice in the preceding year, missing compliance submissions both times.
• Built: Symfony middleware orchestrating the full data path with audit trails and exception handling. Replaced the fragile Zapier-based attempt. Every event signed, timestamped, and retained for the regulator-required retention window.
• Result: 3 FTE returned to billable work. Compliance reporting reduced from three days to four hours. Silent failures eliminated. Audit response time reduced from “we will get back to you” to under five minutes.
• Stack: Symfony 7, Homes NSW Public API, Uptick API, MariaDB, audit-grade logging.

A specialty retailer, name confidential

• Problem: 60+ Zaps connecting Shopify, Klaviyo, Xero, and a Google Sheets warehouse stock register. Roughly two Zaps a week broke silently. Customer notifications were duplicating or missing. The accounting team had stopped trusting the daily reconciliation.
• Built: Consolidated 18 business-critical flows onto event-driven middleware. Kept 14 low-stakes Zaps. Retired 28 redundant ones. New monitoring and alerting on every critical path.
• Result: Silent failures eliminated. Recovery time on flow failures reduced from days to under an hour. Daily reconciliation now trusted again. Premium Zapier subscription downgraded to a smaller tier, recovering roughly $400 per month.
• Stack: Symfony, PostgreSQL, Shopify Admin API, Xero API, Klaviyo API, AWS Sydney.

A consumer marketplace, name confidential

• Problem: Customer support automation built on Zapier was duplicating tickets when retries fired. Both the original and the duplicate would get worked, doubling the cost of support per ticket. The support team had stopped using the automation but the duplicates kept arriving.
• Built: Idempotent middleware handlers ensuring each customer event is processed exactly once. Existing Zaps replaced. The same support team workflow, but reliable underneath.
• Result: Duplicate tickets eliminated. Support hours per active customer down measurably. Support team retention improved (fewer staff leaving due to frustration with the duplicates).
• Stack: Symfony, Redis idempotency cache, custom support workflow engine, AWS Sydney.

Who you will work with

Automation consolidation is delicate work. The staff who built the original Zaps are usually still in the business and are an essential source of knowledge. The consolidation is rarely a criticism of them. They got the automation done. The consolidation is about making it durable for the next decade.

How we ship it

Four named stages. Each one is fixed scope and fixed price. You can pause between any two without losing progress.

Most engagements run four to 10 weeks total. We can deliver a single critical-flow rebuild in two to three weeks if needed.

Business process automation FAQs