Automation Not Triggering On its Own When Trigger Criteria Met

jt1999

Hi - I am using Smartsheet to manage our cutover plan for a software deployment. I have 2 columns that populate a Yes/No value automatically based on a formula calculation. Those columns are called 'Trigger Date' and 'Trigger Time Comparison'. The 'Trigger Time Comparison' is always the last column to flip to Yes, so I set this as the trigger for my automation. The automation checks to see if specific criteria are met. If they are - then the automation flips the Task Status for the impacted row to Completed.

I have been working at this for hours and have tried doing countless refreshes/saves after tasks have flipped to Yes in the Trigger Time Comparison column. The automation never runs on its own. The only way I have gotten it to work is by manually triggering it. Am I doing something wrong here?

For additional context - the trigger date and trigger time columns use date in the sheet to determine if a certain point in time has reached. Our sheet has a finish date column, so if today's date is greater than or equal to the finish date, this column updates the value to Yes. The Trigger Time column is a bit more complex: I feed into a cell in the Smartsheet what the current time is through a Google Sheets/Zapier integration. This gets updated every 3-4 minutes. My sheet then takes a Finish Time column, dissects and calculates for the number of minutes and compares that to the number of minutes attached to the current time. If the current time in minutes is greater than or equal to the finish time, then this flips the Trigger Time Comparison column value to Yes.

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jt1999

Since originally posting - I went a step further to simplify the automation, which still is not working. When both the aforementioned fields are flipped to Yes, this new column gets flipped to 'Ready', which in turn activates the automation. Anyone have any ideas how to get this to work? Similarly, when manually triggering the automation this too successfully runs.

Hudson_Miller

@jt1999 -

Hello - I've read through your post a couple of times and if I understand correctly you have already 'packaged' the conditions that need to be met in the field "Ready for Date Anchor Trigger." If this is correct, the condition block in your automation is probably not necessary as it's a redundant check.

If I've mis-understood, try packaging the conditions that need to be met that you currently have in the automation to also be in the formula that packages "Ready."

The automation is not instantaneous, I've seen it take up to 20 min to run on sheets I've assembled. Other things to consider that may be at play are that if your data is being refreshed every 3-4 minutes, you may be expecting a faster response than the automation may be able to keep up with.

A final though is that if you are using the automation to simply change a cell value, you can change that cell value with an IF|AND formula combination which will run instantly.

-Hudson

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