# How automation is implemented.

Automation is a key topic in enterprise data systems. When some conditions are met, you want things to happen. There are automations remove from the stock the items that are checked out, to send a message to the stocker's terminals when an item changes price, to make a stock request to a warehouse when a store is about to run out of a particular item, to apply discounts at check-out after changing the price tag on the shelves...

Automation is at the heart of enterprise systems. Any issue related to a critical automation will impact the business, and there may be hundreds or thousands of those automations. This is the reason why corporations and governments spend large sums of money to build platforms that are as robust as possible. This is why some migrations to a cloud platform take years to complete with costs that sometimes triple the initial budget.

!!! example

    There are tons of examples of unsuccessful transformations caused by the enormous complexity of business automation. The Birmingham's City Council wanted to [migrate](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/uks-birmingham-city-to-spend-465m-fixing-oracle-cloud-issue/) from on-the-premises systems to the cloud. The budget went from £19M at the beginning of the project to £38M two years later, and £100M four years after the start. At the moment of writing this example systems were not fully functional, and there was no estimation for the final delivery date. The officials responded that these kind of delays were *not unusual* for migrations of such magnitude, and they're absolutely right.

For each automation you should decide the execution time, with many possible choices:

* Immediately when the condition occurs
* Periodically, each hour or every day at midnight
* On demand after a required authorization

# Triggers to act on a given condition

Let's open the `stock` terminal run a little experiment.

# If it works, don't touch it

Creating robust automations is key for the operations of any corporation. Automations tend to become systemic, and if somethigs works as expected, there's a strong motivation to touch it as little as possible. Even nowadays it's common to find out that the automations dealing with payments are still implemented with COBOL, and in that case, the process to migrate from COBOL to other "enterprise" language like Java, takes half a decade to complete.