The “New” Business Process Flows in Dynamics 365

One of the reason that Dynamics scores over many other CRMs is the competency to create and customize business process flows and initiate workflows. The new Dynamics 365 announcement of CRM late last year has one of cool upgrading of the Business Process Flows. Business Process Flow in MicrosoftDynamics 365 is a tool, which is meant to help guide users through a business process in the system. Business process flows are representations of your business processes and are displayed visually in Dynamics 365 as a heading across the top of an entity form. This can be modified to suit the business process requirements for that entity.

A business process flow is composed of Stages, and within each stage there are Steps to complete which are fields. In the business process flow heading, a user can see which stage they are at in the procedure, and which steps they want to complete before they proceed.

Business process flows permit organizations to require users to complete certain steps before completing the process and if wanted you can also allow users to jump stages. They are accessible both for out-of-the-box entities and custom entities. Additionally, an entity can have many business process flows connected with it. They are highly configurable to fit your   365. They are meant to be a guide for a user to aid them in completing a process.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes several ready-to-use business processes for common sales, service, and marketing situations – to help you certify that staff follows consistent steps every time they work with customers. Before you can use these processes, you need to add them to the system.

So what’s new or altered with the new editor for the Business Process Flows? Its now possible to Switch between multiple BUSINESS PROCESSFLOWS and you switch between them, Dynamics 365 will remember where you are in each of the Business Process Flows.

Formerly when you had an entity that was BUSINESS PROCESS FLOWS enabled by a lookup called "Process stage" and when this altered you knew that the record had changed stage in the workflow. In order to handle the last point, the underlying architecture of the Business Process Flows has been improved.

Business Process flows now include additional actions that can be taken versus simply updating fields (steps) within a stage.  Stages can now execute workflows with a trigger of Stage Entry, or Stage Exit (you may want some workflows to send notifications when users enter a stage, and others to send notifications upon users exiting a stage). Note that for the workflow to show up to be selected in your Business Process, it has to be set to run On Demand, has to be the same entity as the Business Process stage, and has to be initiated.

A great use case of using workflow is to have it at the achievement of a Business Process (therefore Stage Exit of the final stage), which will then use the Perform Action workflow step, to Set Process.  You can then automatically kick off the next Business Process as the current Business Process ends.  For example, you can have the completion of a specific Business Process on an Opportunity kick off a workflow that creates a Case, and activates a Business Process on that newly created Case.

Additional Status Reasons

Business Process Flows that are active on record can now be abandoned.  This can be done via the Process dropdown, and business processes can be queried using Advanced Find (an entity will appear for each BUSINESS PROCESS FLOWS you have) with status reasons of Active, Finished, and Aborted. Users can also mark a process as Finished if it’s in the last stage of the process.  Abandoned processes change the process color to gray while Finished processes remain green.  You can reactivate Abandoned and Finished processes.

Concurrent Processes

With Dynamics 365, you’re no longer confined to having a single Business Process flow active at a time for a record.  You can now have concurrent processes that run in parallel without conflict.  Different users or departments may be working multiple processes on the same record at the same time, and the state of the process is maintained. 

When you switch a process, you’ll be able to see what date/time each process was started on for the record you’re on.

Security Updates

First off, one major change is that for every Business Process flow you have, you’ll see these show up in native Security Roles in a Business Process Flow tab.  From this tab you’re able to provide Create, Read, Write or Delete, Append and Append To authorizations to your BUSINESS PROCESS FLOWS.    This is because going forward; every business process you create and initiate becomes a table in the database just like any other entity. Every instance of that process (applied to a record) is a row in the table.

One requirements to know -Your process will not show up in this tab until you initiate the process.  If you deactivate it after updating security roles, the process will remain in this tab so you may NOT need to go back and update your security roles again.  It’ll only be removed from the security role tab once you delete the process.

Soluzione is offering free consultations to discuss ways to style Dynamics CRM to empower your employees to be productive, empowered and to capture valuable business data to grow your business. Just drop us a line at info@solzit.com