Orchestrating Complexity: How to Trigger Multiple Workflows from a Single Event

In modern business, a single event rarely has a single consequence. A new customer signs up, and a cascade of actions must follow: a welcome email, a CRM entry, a sales team notification, a new account provisioned in your backend. A high-priority support ticket is created, and you need to page an on-call engineer, post in a Slack channel, and update a status page simultaneously.

Handling this complexity manually is a recipe for inefficiency and error. Traditional automation might chain these actions into a single, monolithic script that's brittle and hard to maintain. But there's a more elegant, powerful, and resilient approach: triggering multiple, independent workflows from a single event.

This is the core principle of event-driven automation, and with Triggers.do, it's not just possible—it's simple to implement as code.

The Power of the "Fan-Out" Model

Think of a single business event, like a new order being created in your Shopify store, as a broadcast signal. In a traditional, linear workflow, you might have one process that listens for this signal and then sequentially tries to:

1. Update inventory.
2. Send an order confirmation email.
3. Notify the fulfillment team.
4. Add the customer to a marketing list.

If step #2 fails, does the whole process halt? What if you only want to do step #4 for first-time customers? This is where the model breaks down.

The "fan-out" model, which is central to Triggers.do, flips this on its head. The shopify.order.created event is broadcast, and multiple, specialized "listeners" can react to it in parallel. Each listener is a trigger that starts its own dedicated, agentic workflow.

• Workflow A: Manages order fulfillment. It runs for every order.
• Workflow B: Handles high-value orders. It runs only if the order total exceeds a certain amount.
• Workflow C: Updates your marketing list. It runs only if it's the customer's first purchase.

This approach decouples your business logic, making your automations more modular, scalable, and resilient. If the marketing workflow fails, fulfillment and high-value order processing are completely unaffected.

A Practical Example: Orchestrating a New Shopify Order

Let's see just how easy this is with Triggers.do. Imagine we want to implement the exact logic described above for a new Shopify order. We can define several triggers, all listening to the same shopify.order.created event, but each with its own unique purpose and conditions.

import { trigger } from '@do-sdk/triggers';

// Define the common event we'll be listening to.
const NEW_SHOPIFY_ORDER = 'shopify.order.created';

// --- Trigger 1: Process ALL orders for fulfillment ---
// This trigger has no filter, so it runs for every new order.
await trigger.create({
  name: 'Standard Order Fulfillment',
  event: NEW_SHOPIFY_ORDER,
  workflow: 'process-order-fulfillment-workflow',
});

// --- Trigger 2: Handle HIGH-VALUE orders for special processing ---
// This trigger uses a filter to only run for orders over $250.
await trigger.create({
  name: 'High-Value Order Alert',
  event: NEW_SHOPIFY_ORDER,
  filter: 'body.total_price > 250.00',
  workflow: 'vip-order-processing-workflow',
});

// --- Trigger 3: Add new customers to a welcome sequence ---
// This filter checks a custom flag in the event payload.
await trigger.create({
  name: 'New Customer Welcome Sequence',
  event: NEW_SHOPIFY_ORDER,
  filter: 'body.customer.orders_count == 1',
  workflow: 'add-to-new-customer-email-workflow',
});

In this single, declarative file, we've orchestrated a complex business process. We have three distinct workflows that can run in parallel, triggered by one event from a single webhook integration, all managed as simple, version-controlled code.

The Benefits of Multi-Workflow Orchestration

Adopting this event-driven, multi-workflow strategy provides immediate and significant advantages for your business process automation.

• Modularity and Maintainability: Each workflow is a self-contained unit of logic. You can update, test, or debug the "New Customer Welcome" workflow without ever touching the critical "Order Fulfillment" process.
• Targeted Logic with Filters: As shown in the code example, you can apply powerful conditional logic to incoming events. This ensures that workflows only run when the exact criteria are met, reducing unnecessary processing and making your automations incredibly precise.
• Parallel Execution and Speed: When an event triggers multiple workflows, our platform can initiate them in parallel. You don't have to wait for the CRM to be updated before the fulfillment team is notified. This dramatically speeds up your response to critical business events.
• Resilience and Fault Tolerance: In a monolithic script, one failure can bring everything to a halt. In our decoupled model, the failure of one non-essential workflow (like a Slack notification) has zero impact on other critical workflows (like fraud analysis or inventory updates).

Start Orchestrating Today

Stop trying to force complex, branching logic into a single, linear process. Embrace the power of events. By using a single event trigger to launch multiple, targeted agentic workflows, you can build automation systems that are more powerful, flexible, and resilient.

Ready to turn a single webhook into a symphony of automated workflows? Explore Triggers.do and start defining your event-driven automations as simple, powerful code.