Most businesses will use both general purpose automation solutions as well as use case specific automation solutions. It is not an either-or choice. It is important to understand the fundamental difference between those two approaches to make informed choices on where to use which technology.
The boon and bane of general purpose automation solution is that they can be used to automate pretty much anything. This sometimes leads to them being used in cases where they are not the best choice.
Going back to the example of marketing automation: an iPaaS can easily be used to schedule automatic send-out of email campaigns. However as they are usually targeted at a more technical user base, marketing experts might not be able to use them on their own. It will most likely also be more complicated and costly to set up a marketing automation process with an iPaaS platform than with a marketing automation solution.
On the other hand, many businesses shy away from using general-purpose automation solution precisely because they are a bit more complicated to set up. This can lead to a situation where each department uses their own automation solution, e.g for accounting or marketing, but they are disconnected. This leads to many manual steps left over in the work of experts, e.g. copy-pasting customer data into the marketing automation tools, informing the sales department manually about leads generated through marketing campaigns, etc.
In most cases, a combination of both approaches delivers the best results. Again in the example of marketing automation, an iPaaS solution can be used to connect the marketing automation solution to customer data, so that target group selection for campaigns can be based on customer profiles. The iPaaS solution can also be used to automatically transfer generated leads to the sales department’s CRM tool.
All in all, there is no universal automation solution that fits all use cases and areas of implementation. This article focuses on the difference between general purpose and use case specific automation solutions. If you are interested to learn more about different types of general purpose automation solutions, you can download our free whitepaper “How to Pick the Right Automation Tool in 2021” which compares different general-purpose automation solutions.