How to conditionally delay a scheduled automation run in Automation Studio

Question

I have an automation process which is scheduled to run on the first Monday of every month. This automation has a "Journey Builder Trigger" activity for injecting contacts to a journey.

I need to come up with a way to delay the injection of the contacts (delay the target automation schedule) for 1 day if today i.e. (the day automation runs) is a Public Holiday.

I've already created the process to fetch and update the public holiday dates in a separate DE.

My Idea was to add a verification step to the automation and if the counter in a separate DE (which matches with the public holiday DE and sets counter to 1 if its a holiday) is set to 1 than STOP the automation.

This process now works but the automation than needs to be manually run the next day.

I need to figure out a way to run this automation process to automatically run on the next day which is Tuesday if Monday was a holiday.

Answer 1

You could create a second automation that runs on the first Tuesday of the Month and apply a similar verification logic -- if counter is 1 then run that Tuesday automation, else stop the automation.

Alternatively, if you have a data extension already set up with holidays, add logic within the SQL query of your Journey Data Extension to lookup that Holiday DE. Something like:

WHERE CONVERT(DATE, HolidayDate) != CONVERT(DATE, GETDATE())

But you would still need to manually run on that Tuesday or have an automation run on Tuesday. The Verification Activity only allows you to stop the automation or send an email so either way there would need to be a second automation.