Reduce Latency and Increase Efficiency with Real-Time Workflows

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, speed isn't just a feature—it's a fundamental expectation. Customers expect instant confirmations, teams need immediate updates, and systems must react in the blink of an eye. The delay between an event happening and your business logic reacting to it is known as latency. This hidden tax on your operations can lead to poor customer experiences, inefficient processes, and missed opportunities.

Traditionally, automation has relied on polling—periodically checking for new data. This "are we there yet?" approach is inherently slow and resource-intensive. But what if your systems could react the very moment an event occurs?

This is the promise of event-driven automation. By building real-time workflows, you can eliminate latency, boost efficiency, and truly automate at the speed of your business.

The Problem with Traditional Automation: The High Cost of Waiting

Many automation workflows are built on a polling mechanism. Imagine a script that runs every five minutes to check for new, high-value orders.

• At 10:01 AM: A VIP customer places a $1,000 order.
• At 10:05 AM: The scheduled script finally runs, discovers the order, and triggers the fulfillment process.

In those four minutes of waiting, the perceived responsiveness of your business has dropped. The customer is waiting for their confirmation, and your fulfillment team is four minutes behind. While this might seem small, these delays compound across thousands of events, creating significant operational drag.

Polling-based automation introduces several key problems:

• Built-in Latency: The delay is, at best, your polling interval. At worst, it's just under double that interval.
• Wasted Resources: The vast majority of checks (polls) find nothing new, consuming valuable API quotas, CPU cycles, and database connections for no reason.
• Scalability Issues: As your business grows, you either have to poll more frequently, increasing resource waste, or accept longer delays.

The Shift to Real-Time: Embracing Event-Driven Workflows

Event-driven architecture (EDA) flips the script. Instead of your systems constantly pulling for information, the source system pushes an "event" notification the instant something happens. It’s the difference between refreshing a tracking page every minute and getting an instant "delivered" notification.

This is where Triggers.do comes in. Our platform is designed to be the central nervous system for your business's events. We provide the tools to listen for these real-time events from any source and instantly connect them to the right workflow.

By moving to an event-driven model, you're not just making things faster; you're building a more resilient, efficient, and intelligent system.

How Triggers.do Slashes Latency and Boosts Efficiency

With Triggers.do, you define a Workflow Trigger—a set of rules that listens for a specific event and initiates an action. This simple but powerful concept has a massive impact.

Let's revisit our high-value order example. With Triggers.do, your e-commerce platform (like Shopify) sends a webhook—a real-time event notification—the moment an order is created.

You can configure a trigger in seconds:

import { Trigger } from 'triggers.do';

// A trigger that starts the 'HighValueOrderFulfillment' workflow
// whenever a new order over $500 is placed.
const highValueOrderTrigger = new Trigger({
  event: 'platform.order.created',
  filter: 'data.totalAmount > 500',
  action: {
    workflow: 'HighValueOrderFulfillment',
    inputs: {
      orderId: '{{data.id}}',
      customerEmail: '{{data.customer.email}}'
    }
  }
});

await highValueOrderTrigger.activate();

Here’s what happens now:

1. Instant Event: A $1,000 order is placed. The platform.order.created event is fired and sent to your Triggers.do endpoint in milliseconds.
2. Real-Time Filtering: The trigger instantly evaluates the event payload and confirms that data.totalAmount > 500 is true.
3. Immediate Action: The HighValueOrderFulfillment workflow is initiated immediately, passing along the orderId and customerEmail.

The entire process, from order placement to workflow activation, happens in near real-time. The latency is reduced from minutes to milliseconds.

More Than Just Speed: Intelligent and Efficient Automation

Reducing latency is just the beginning. Real-time workflows unlock a new level of process efficiency.

1. Run Workflows with Surgical Precision:
The powerful filtering engine in Triggers.do ensures that workflows only run when they're supposed to. You can listen to a broad event stream, like user.signed_up, but trigger different actions based on the event's data.

• Trigger A: If data.plan === 'free', start the "Free User Onboarding" workflow.
• Trigger B: If data.plan === 'enterprise', trigger the "Enterprise Trial" workflow, which also creates a lead in Salesforce and notifies your sales team on Slack.

This allows you to create lean, targeted workflows instead of a single, monolithic process bogged down by complex conditional logic.

2. Connect Any System, Any Time:
Modern businesses rely on a constellation of SaaS tools and internal applications. Triggers.do can ingest events from virtually any source:

• Webhooks from platforms like Stripe, GitHub, or Twilio.
• Messages from pub/sub systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
• Database changes captured via change-data-capture (CDC).
• Custom events sent directly from your application's backend via our flexible API.

This makes Triggers.do the single point of activation for all your Business Process Automation needs, breaking down data silos and connecting your entire tech stack.

3. Conserve Valuable Resources:
By eliminating polling, you stop wasting resources on empty checks. Your compute and network resources are only used when there is actual work to be done. This leads to direct cost savings on cloud infrastructure and third-party API usage, and it allows your systems to scale more gracefully.

Stop Polling, Start Reacting

The move from periodic polling to real-time, event-driven automation is a critical step in building a modern, competitive business. It allows you to deliver the instantaneous experience your customers demand while creating hyper-efficient internal processes.

Triggers.do provides the powerful, developer-friendly platform to make this transition seamless.

Ready to eliminate latency and automate at the speed of your business? Get started with Triggers.do today!