As en example take a typical purchase requisition or expense claim submission that most companies would run.  In the good old days, paper forms would be provided to staff, who would fill those out and put them in the in trays of managers for approval.  The piece of paper would work it’s way around the organisation for approvals and reconciliation in the accounts department.  Along came technology and users replaced paper forms with electronic documents in spreadsheets or word processing documents.   Taking the master document users would create a copy, complete and submit to the proverbial in tray, aka your email inbox.  Again, this form would be sent round the organisation, with multiple copies residing in user emails or hard discs on local computers.  Many organisations are practicing this on a daily basis and have lots of various business processes run in a similar manner.

Once you have migrated to Google Apps for Business, you have the opportunity to rethink all the traditional practices and consider the opportunity to re-design and automate.  Not only does Google Apps allow you to avoid sending documents around the organisation via email, instead opting to collaborate real-time in an online document, you also have the opportunity to create powerful workflow and automation around standard business processes.

Everything is developed, stored and executed in the cloud, running on the Google infrastructure which means that your scripts will continue to run, in the background, from any browser, even when you are not attending the document itself.  Throw in a little email notification and workflow approvals, and you will be eliminating manual labour out of the equation.

Here is a quick example to demonstrate a workflow approval process on how to submit expense requests and have them approved.

Let us know what you think and how many ideas you can come up with for automation for using Google Apps Script.