We just closed out a busy first half of 2026 on the Sage 300 conference circuit: Kuala Lumpur, South Africa, San Francisco, and finally TPAC North America in Toronto. Thank you to every partner and customer who stopped by our stand, sat through a session, or showed up to a bootcamp.
The Sage 300 community spirit never gets old, and meeting you face-to-face is still the best part of our season.
For those of you we didn't catch in Toronto, here's the one idea worth carrying home - a framework that reframes automation as the foundation on which everything else, AI included, gets built.
Business Automation Pyramid
Mich Martins of Mware, and also TPAC's director, led a session on Business Automation using a framework he calls the Business Automation Pyramid. Thanks to Mich for letting us borrow it here. It places business intent at the top and execution systems at the bottom, five layers deep:
- Strategy & Business Models: Customers, markets, products, innovation.
Automation serves these outcomes; never the other way around.
- Process Intelligence: What's actually happening, not what you assume is happening.
This is also home to the "digital twin" idea: model the future state before you touch anything live.
- Process Management: Who does what, with what data, and who's accountable.
Compliance lives here too, solid, but never rigid.
- Integration Logic: Where automation projects actually succeed or fail.
Most businesses have data everywhere, a website, an ERP system, a support desk, a dozen spreadsheets, and emails. These data sources need to speak to each other.
- Functional Layer: Where the real transactions happen.
Get this right, and you've built the foundation AI actually needs to be useful.
Where Orchid Fits
Orchid isn't trying to cover the whole pyramid. Our sweet spot is integration logic and the functional layer, with a foot in process management and compliance too:
- Extender: Tailors Sage 300 to how your business actually works, and fires events and Python scripts whenever a record changes using the Sage 300 desktop, web screens, Sage CRM, imports, or AutoSimply apps.
- Process Scheduler: Runs Sage 300's critical processes unattended.
- EFT Processing: Turns vendor payments, customer direct debits, and payroll into a one-click bank file.
- Inter-Entity: Automates loan accounts and transactions between entities.
- TeamWork: Our newest addition, it pairs AutoSimply AC Chat with Extender and Notes. It lets your team chat about and approve Sage 300 records from a phone, with every conversation and decision staying on the record for audit day.
Watch the webinar
That's the recap, but the live version had demos we couldn't fit into a blog post, so if you want the full picture, watch the video below of our June 2026 webinar.
We're still in the early stages of figuring out what all this AI talk means for Orchid specifically, and we'll be the first to admit it: our own attempts at AI-generated images so far prove we're automation people, not artists.
But the roadmap is taking shape, and we're genuinely excited about what's ahead for Sage 300, and for what we build on top of it.
