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I'm curious to know what tools you use to automate your business operations (if any).
For example, https://zapier.com is one such automation tool.
If you don't use any tools, do you use any frameworks or systems you've made yourself?
If you don't automate any parts of your business, why not? (I'm interested in the reasons why, not disputing the choice)
My best automating stuff story, though, is automating complaint letters to UK banks. We were pushing the limits of what the UK's Direct Debit system can handle, and as a result were seeing all the edge cases where banks got it wrong. One common one was banks accidentally charging back a payment twice, and each bank had their own, totally bespoke complaints procedure for getting in touch when that happened.
A couple of engineers and me spent a couple of days integrating with Lob and a fax provider whose name I forget to automatically write complaint letters every time the banks screwed up. Some of these were being sent to named individuals for all Direct Debit complaints related to RBS, for example.
Needless to say, the banks fixed the problems that were causing us to need to complain soon enough. :-)
Invoices and late payment reminders I've automated with my invoicing system (Crunch)
So what we did, was on the new projects we started using DeployBot, which was very nice especially for the development team. Then we started to see what can we do on the legacy projects and once we have more time from other projects we tackle one older project at a time where we automate at least parts of it.
It can be a very annoying process especially if you have people in your team who where used at a certain style of the process, but I think in the long run it was worth it.
Our automation workflow is build on as many standard tools as we can find, because inventing it here costs a lot of money and we're not experts at it. So it looks smart to use what exists as smart as we can. We take vendor ISOs from microsoft, linux, et cetera and use Packer/Vagrant to build them up inside a vSphere cluster. Packer is starting to get really good support for ESX 6.5, which means we can build right off a datastore and flip the template directly into our orchestration suite for "purchase". Our process is executed in Jenkins Multibranch Pipeline. Our sysadmin-turning-developers are learning a lot this year, and the Jenkins Pipeline is a great way to shield them from details they are free to know but don't have the time for.
The core of our build environment is some reflective shell script that becomes aware of its environment as it is loaded. We're able to abstract across environments, datacenters, et al just by some clever situational awareness. The basics always end up being the most valuable, and our little ecosystem orbiting around a pile of terse, self-documenting shell scripts that any sysadmin can understand has been a successful gambit.